Earthling
Reviews

Stephen Malkmus, Pavement:

“I totally recommend this book of poems. Earthling is full art I relate to: earth sensations and weird brain jumps. The key (for me) is sincere connection with awareness, and I feel it in this book. From sing to sung, it shreds.”

New City:

“[Earthling] moves like a record, weaving in and out of loud, boisterous offenses and devilish-yet-poignant minimalism, like connecting the stars of a constellation with the invisible pen on the tip of your finger.”

H_NGM_N:

“Fantastic . . . Healey’s best efforts here might be said to do what poetry does when it really works—namely, to expose the raw scaffolding of sense-making and belief by transmitting, and simultaneously translating, our predicament through the all too human, yet alien, device of consciousness.”

Daily Iowan:

“Earthling represents an endeavor of imagination in a predictable society that is accessible to not only lovers of poetry but anyone who dares ponder a world both like and unlike our own.”

Corresponder:

“Healey’s world is one where we are all tuned in, all part of the same mass media circulatory system, but where meaningful human contact is becoming a thing of the past century. . . . a poignant reflection of our time.”

Minneapolis City Pages:

“You have to wonder what was in his bowl of Wheaties when Steve Healey sat down to pen Earthling . . . filled mostly with one-page poems fortified by a crisp and pleasing cadence.”

Rake:

“Intelligent, playful, and fast-moving, [Healey’s poems] contain a sense of genuine wonder and the power to astonish again and again . . . These are poems with a sensibility of quiet humor, startling inversion, and depth.”

Whistling Shade:

“The poems in Earthling are written for the alienated among us; the imprisoned, the poor, the homeless, and the hopeless. They come surrounded by a surprising intellect. And as an added bonus there is a wry humor haunting most of the pieces of this book.”

Mary Ruefle:

“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.”

James Tate:

“Steve Healey’s dazzling first book of poems, Earthling, will leave you reeling. Poem after poem, bold imagination coupled with intense passion sets this book ablaze. His very unique sense of humor adds to the delight.”