Tom Healy
Poet
Author of What the Right Hand Knows
Raised on a family farm in upstate New York, Tom Healy left after high school to study philosophy at Harvard. There he earned his B.A. and went on to earn his M.F.A. from Columbia University.
Tom Healy’s first book of poetry, What the Right Hand Knows, was published by Four Way Books in October 2009 with an introduction by poet Richard Howard and cover art by poet John Ashbery. The book was nominated for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award.
Healy is a visiting fellow at the Goreé Institute in Dakar and a lecturer at Pratt in Brooklyn, where he teaches a seminar on the musical obsessions of writers. His poems and essays about contemporary artists have appeared in the Paris Review, Yale Review, BOMB, Salmagundi, Tin House, Drunken Boat and other journals. He serves on the boards of Creative Time and Poets House.
A veteran of the New York art scene, Healy opened one of the first art galleries in Chelsea, showing many young artists who went on to prominence, including Tom Sachs, Janet Cardiff, Kara Walker and Karen Finley. He also served as president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, where he led rebuilding efforts for the downtown arts community after 9/11. He has traveled extensively on international microfinance projects and AIDS prevention efforts and was a member of President Clinton’s White House Council on AIDS. He was recently appointed chair of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board by President Obama.
Healy splits his time between New York City, Miami, and Washington DC., where he lives with his partner Fred Hochberg, Chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Hochberg was acting director of the Small Business Administration under President Clinton and is one of the top gay political fundraisers in New York City.
“A wave of spontaneous greeting and implacable fluid motion breaks over these remarkable poems ... What the Right Hand Knows is, like Giotto’s, a perfect circle, ‘the shape of astonishment.’ This is an utterly brilliant and uncommon first book, a voice like no other.” —Carol Muske-Dukes
Healy's sensual, urgent debut collection moves from farmyard to cityscape as it depicts a teetering, asymmetric world. A speaker "deaf in one ear" ponders that "the Moon's dark side / has no sound"; a mother and child finally "take the journey they'd talked about" but get only "a Sunday drive on Tuesday," a near-miss "tracing circumferences." Healy's assured rhythms and measured stresses ballast the uncertainty of social relationships and bodily suffering. He seeks past the self for ways to act: "the task is to remember / the troubled blood of others, // and not remember // the bliss of deeper waters." This book of "salt and work," of surviving ourselves, our illnesses, and our language, tenderly explores the unsaid and under-the-surface of the separate lives we live together: "we sat // in the rocking chairs / of each other's / moods." An intimate, intelligent, and lively debut. —Indie Bound
