Safe Houses I Have Known

A father revealed as a spy, a child unmoored from normalcy—in Safe Houses I Have Known, poems ripple with the secrets that we keep from ourselves and each other.

As a child during the height of the Cold War, Steve Healey learns that his father is a spy for the CIA. Beneath the banality of everyday life—the suburbs of Washington, DC; school and play; his parents’ deteriorating marriage—assumed names, parallel lives, and myriad Cold War menaces linger. Drawing from CIA training manuals and pop culture references alike, Healey’s poetry is both intimate and claustrophobic. In these poems, the natural anxiety of childhood is compounded by the weight of both national and family secrets, and Healey draws deep parallels between the shaky foundations of truth in his past and the paranoia and obfuscation that envelops our nation’s present.

Publication Date: September 10, 2019 

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page Count: 112 pages

ISBN: 9781566895613

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 the Nation, 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.

Finalist for the 2020 Believer Book Award in Poetry

Finalist for the 2020 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry

“Pairing formal poetic lines with conceptually driven fragments, Healey carves a space for innovation within received forms. By blending personal narrative and found language, he evokes, and reverses, the power dynamics implicit in surveillance.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Through clever wordplay, Safe Houses I Have Known aptly conjures the terror of a world where everyone watches everyone.” 

—Shelf Awareness

“Poems are immediate. They bring human reality to code words, clandestine terminology, ruse and deception . . . Throughout we discover Healey's superlative skill in conveying emotion through poetry.” 

—Decatur Daily

“With skillfully rendered domestic detail and tension, Steve Healey’s Safe Houses I Have Known discloses that there is scant buffer between civilian life and espionage. . . . Through such uneasy quiet, Healey’s chilling collection confides that conflict is intimate, no matter how much language a global superpower encodes to insist otherwise.” 

—Douglas Kearney 

“Healey goes at the complexity of our attachments with a style and verve that pushes against the burden of the material: what is weighty is also buoyant in poems that jump and swerve thanks to the playfulness of his mind and language.”

—Bob Hicok 

“Through scrupulous intelligence, dark wit, and his generous yet wily imagination, Healey lays bare the disassociation and guilt of our complicity in our country’s practices of self-surveillance, military coups, lies, and deceit. . . .Such a clear-eyed portrait is rare, as is the presence of both horror and love.”

—Gillian ConoleyPraise for Steve Healey

“Though these poems are rangy, Healey nonetheless keeps each one focused on a single theme, which is, in turn, a facet of an elaborate mirror that shows us ourselves, our difficulty, and our promise, refracted through an unremittingly honest world—‘Not a day ends without the sun totally surrendering.’ Brilliant and deeply moving.”

—Cole Swensen

“These poems are so enlivened they seem to have yeast in them. In every one, the consequences of a single thought or action expand to the ends of the alphabet. They talk right at you as if there were no tomorrow, but in the best of all possible finales, decide that there is.”

—Mary Ruefle

“Somehow Steve Healey has figured out a way to get a new sound out of the saxophone of English. 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