Eloise Klein Healy is the author of six books of poetry: Building Some Changes (Beyond Baroque Foundation); A Packet Beating Like a Heart (Books Of A Feather Press); Ordinary Wisdom (Paradise Press/re-released by Red Hen Press); Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books), nominated for the Lambda Book Award and released as a spoken word recording by New Alliance Records; and her collections from Red Hen Press, Passing and most recently, The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho. The Inevitable Press published her chapbook Women’s Studies Chronicles in the Laguna Poets Series.
Healy’s work has been widely anthologized in collections including The World In Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave; The Geography Of Home: California’s Poetry of Place; Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals; Grand Passion: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond; California Poetry: From The Gold Rush to the Present; and Another City: Writing From Los Angeles. She has also published bio-bibliographic reviews of the poets Muriel Rukeyser and Elsa Gidlow.
Ms. Healy has been awarded artist residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Dorland Mountain Colony. She was the Grand Prize winner of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival Competition, and she has received grants from The California Arts Council, the CSUN Merit Award Program, and a COLA Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles. She directed the Women’s Studies Program at California State University Northridge and taught in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. The Founding Chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles where she is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita. Healy is also the co-founder of ECO-ARTS, an ecotourism/arts venture and Guest Poet at the Idyllwild Summer Poetry Festival. Her imprint with Red Hen Press, Arktoi Books, established in 2006, specializes in publishing the work of lesbian authors.
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STANDING UP, LOOKING IN
This country is preparing a war,
inking the insides of guns
to print the right death,
and I am on a hillside far away,
anxious the wind will blow me
face first into a tall yucca
I’m smelling today.
When I walk down by the highway,
strangers wave at me
and I wave at them when I drive past
road crews, survey crews, the telephone repair.
But the war will be popular again.
There are strangers to be against
and the irony is always missing.
We even marry strangers.
Here I stretch, I stand tall
and stick my nose close
to the sappy ooze of waxy white blossoms,
purpled edges, the open smell.
War has density and seriousness.
I have just my balance
and my tremendous desire to reach.
Ordinary Wisdom (Paradise Press/ Red Hen Press reprint 2005)
Visit EloiseKleinHealy.com for more poems
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