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, darkly 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 all its absurd variety.
Steve Healey is the author of Earthling. His essays and criticism have appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle and Rain Taxi and his poems have appeared in the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and the journals American Poetry Review, Boston Review, jubilat, and others. He received his MFA at University of Massachusetts-Amherst and his PhD at the University of Minnesota. He lives in Minneapolis, and has recently taught at Michigan State University, Macalester College, and the University of Minnesota.
