10 Mississippi

Playful but ominous, 10 Mississippi reads like a game of hide-and-seek set in America’s rising floodwaters of text and technology.

Fluid, lively, and referential, 10 Mississippi samples language from many cultural tributaries, performing sequels of celebrated twentieth-century poems, riffing on advertising slogans, tongue twisters, formulaic news reports, and everyone’s favorite twenty-six-letter sentence, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Like the proverbial river that is never the same twice, Healey’s poems channel the constant transformation of the modern world and embrace the human drama in a way that makes them a joy to read and revisit.

Publication date: August 17, 2010

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 8.9

Page count: 108 pages

ISBN: 9781566892520

Steve Healey is the author of two previous books of poetry, 10 Mississippi and Earthling, both from Coffee House Press. His poems have been published in magazines such as American Poetry Review, the Awl, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Jubilat, and in anthologies, most recently The New Census: an Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. He’s a professor of English and creative writing at Minneapolis College.

“Loopy, smart, eyebrow-raising, wiggy, and wildly entertaining belong in the string of modifiers that would try to describe this poet’s amazing voice.”

—Billy Collins

“Steve Healey blends the sharp and the sad in such a moving way in this stunning second book, but it’s at the level of the phrase, and behind that, at the level of the idea, that something really extraordinary is going on—Healey’s perspective constantly reinvents itself in striking ways.”

—Cole Swensen

“This is a powerful book, a great book of urgent knowledge.”

—Dara Wier

“Comically obsessive, meditative in wonderfully askew ways, Healey’s poems signal the melding of a frisky poetics with a weighted consciousness of peril: political, environmental, personal.”

—Dean Young

“Healey offers us our shining memories of childhood innocence, and then, just as earnestly, the abrupt but enduring realization that life will never again be so easy.”

—Verse Wisconsin

“A startlingly rich and absorbing read that also stakes a claim to big ideas, and does so using the sort of simple yet endlessly inventive metrics equally familiar to precocious children and the very best poets of our times.”

—Huff Post Books