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A Brilliant Loss
Red Hen Press, 2022
distributed by U. Chicago Press

Eloise Klein Healy’s A Brilliant Loss is a poetic journey into the loss of language and the reclaiming of it. Healy had Wernicke’s aphasia in 2013 when she was the first poet laureate of the City of Los Angeles, and the virus hit her the night of her reading with Caroline Kennedy at the Central Library. Also called fluent aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia affects language and the use of words. Healy’s collection shows that her brain has access to its deepest unconscious, and that place is poetry. Her deepest language is poetry. It’s as if a dancer was denied the ability to walk or run, and could only dance. Healy writes of losing her words and finding big love.

ADVANCED PRAISE

Eloise’s illness, encephalitis, took her on a journey to a strange place, which she is revealing to us in A Brilliant Loss, her new set of poems. She teaches that without language there is no self, no sense of past or future. And no way to express love.  

I’ve had aphasia (much lighter versions than she has had) twice so far, and may again, so I know it as a lonely, frightening, lost-in-the-forest-of-meaning place. To lose recognition of person and geography, to experience a shattering of the brilliant patterns of literacy and verbal expression. To see objects and be unable to name them. Yet recovery can also be full of quirkiness, exuberant joy, and humor—states of feeling Eloise has exhibited for all the forty-two years we’ve known each other. 

Eloise, with amazing support from her partner and others, uses breadcrumb words—poignant—scary—sweet—informing—to show us how she wended her way step by step out of her lost forest back to love, to words, to social life, and to poetry. 

I recommend this book to anyone who has bumped their head.
—Judy Grahn, author of Touching Creature, Touching Spirit

“As a young poet, Eloise Klein Healy “fell on her knees and promised/that poetry would be everything . . .” Imagine then her terror, her shock when one morning she awoke without language. This book is testament to her long, painful, continuing rediscovery of words, of life, of love. Her brain profoundly changed, her heart profoundly changed, she’s sustained again by poetry. She’s sustained by her devoted Colleen, “the wild river whose bank you are.” Her brilliant loss gives us all the gift of these brilliant poems.”
—Peggy Shumaker, former Writer Laureate of Alaska

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Another Phase
Red Hen Press, 2018
distributed by U. Chicago Press

In April 2013, just five months after being named the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, Eloise had a brain injury resulting in Wernicke’s aphasia a breakdown in the symbol system of language. Poetry was the guide and motivation for recovery. This collection is comprised of a series of five-line poems that began as a focusing exercise yet transformed into a remarkable channel for her creativity. These poems are filled with the same features that have pervaded her work, meaning they are serious, at times playful, sometimes beautiful and sometimes goofy. But all have that twist, that meaningful point, that is unique to Eloise’s consciousness.

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A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings
Red Hen Press, 2013 (forthcoming)
distributed by U. Chicago Press

A Wild Surmise is Eloise Klein Healy's seventh book of poetry and the first that includes an audio component. Included are poems from all her previous collections, including her award-winning first collection, Building Some Changes, as well as Artemis In Echo Park and The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho. Upon release, A Wild Surmies ranked in the top 5 of Amazon Best Sellers in Gay & Lesbian poetry.
 
Healy's work is immediately recognizable as poetry written by a woman under the influence of feminism, freeway traffic, wilderness (especially in the city), and a uniquely tuned sense of craft. Her work travels easily across time zones, mythologies, the politics of love, and the inevitable loss of family and friends. She searches for a lesbian tradition in literature, lamenting the erasure of lesbian writers and the fragmented history of their work. But Healy's poetry is not without humor, nor does it shy away from such topics as baseball and the companionship of canines. Like life, poetry to her is "a wild surmise"—never totally translatable, but always worth the attempt.

Note: QR codes take readers holding this book to audio recordings... listen to the poems

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The Islands Project
Red Hen Press, 2007
distributed by U. Chicago Press

Eloise Klein Healy writes poems that refuel my heart. When I read her words, I am pinned by all we are up against—from reactionary politics to the plight of aging parents but the poems also offer the necessary grit, that combination of compassion and tenacity, which makes it possible to be glad for the chance to walk on two legs. Reading this book, I am reminded why there must be poetry in the world, especially now.
—Tim Seibles, author of Body Moves

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Ordinary Wisdom
Paradise Press/Red Hen Press Reprint, 2005
distributed by U. Chicago Press

In May of 2004, a wildfire swept through the Temecula Valley in Southern California, destroying in its path Dorland Mountain Colony, the place where the poems in Ordinary Wisdom were written. Dorland was unique among artists retreats in an electronic age in that there was no electricity or phones in the cabins. Adjusting to the rhythms of light and darkness was the first task in settling in to work. It was the perfect setting for a project that meant to deal with daily life its most ordinary manifestations and its most significant messages. Ordinary Wisdom has been out of print for many years. But I have returned to read from the book time after time, finding poems here that continue to speak to me and to others.
—Eloise Klein Healy

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Passing
Red Hen Press, 2002
distributed by U. Chicago Press

In Passing, Healy's fifth collection and perhaps her best yet, the poet also stops to extol and mourn those who have passed from her life: her father, the poets Lynda Hull and Gil Cuadros, photographer Francesca Woodman. The juxtaposition of these elegies with poems about opossums, magpies, constellations, and learning Spanish brings the sacred into dazzling collision with the everyday, and everything seems richer and more textured as a result.
—Terry Wolverton

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Artemis in Echo Park
Firebrand Books, 1991

The mock-oracular deadpan of the title belies the fact that these poems really do issue from a rift valley of mythic consciousness, that the book is a project to recover and build upon a virgin ground of lesbian identity that pre-dates the false self imposed by homophobic society.... The wigginess of the title of the poem 'The Concepts of Integrity and Closure in Poetry as I Believe They Relate to Sappho' brings to mind the poet Diane Wakoski rather than Sappho....This poem alone would be enough to establish Healy as the most technically accomplished and intelligent Los Angeles poet of her generation.
—Janis Helbert in Lesbian News review

Out of Print
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Women's Studies Chronicles
The Inevitable Press, 1998

If you want to live in a world where mutual respect without violence, then increasing awareness of the reality of gender conflict, its nature, causes, and remedies is a preliminary step in the ongoing struggle to "change the world." That's what Women's Studies are about and that's what these poems are about.
—Pat Cohee, Laguna Poets

Out of Print
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A Packet Beating Like a Heart
Books of a Feather Press, 1981

A Packet Beating Like a Heart is the quintessential collection of poems from Los Angeles—life as seen from a car window and emotions experienced at freeways speeds.
 
This was the first book published by Books of a Feather Press. The cover, designed by Cynthia Marsh, is a composite of native California plants. The book design was by Susan King of Paradise Press who subsequently published Ordinary Wisdom.

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Building Some Changes
The Beyond Baroque Foundation, 1976
Venice, CA

This book was the first collection published under The NewBook Award. Six NewBooks were published in 1976 and 1977. In a unique experiment, financed by the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program, only the author, who was given hundreds of copies, could "sell" copies. They were mailed free to the extensive Foundation mailing list with a form that could be mailed back to the Foundation with a suggested contribution, which was in turn paid to the author.