A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings

A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings 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. 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.

Praise for A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings

What a delight it is to have gathered here these poems from previous collections as well as new poems from a poet I have admired for years. Eloise Klein Healy’s straightforward and wry wit underscores her wisdom and the peacefulness that comes from a deeply humane emotional and intellectual knowledge. A Wild Surmise touches on so many things with such clarity and precision it’s like having a handbook to guide us through the world.—Natasha Trethewey, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2012

A Wild Surmise is full of appreciation for the physical from the freeways of LA and ball bearings pouring into a pan to the sun smell of her dog’s fur. From chili-flakes in a shaker to Greek scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. And through these vivid moments we are given glimpses into the life of a lesbian poet and the culture in which she wrote beginning in the 70s and continuing to the present. Reading Eloise Klein Healy’s New & Selected Poems is like sitting down with a dear friend with a strong cup of tea or a glass of wine and being given the gift of a deep and generous sharing.—Ellen Bass, co-author of The Courage to Heal