As a child during the height of the Cold War, Steve Healey learns that his father is a spy for the CIA. Beneath the banality of everyday life-the suburbs of Washington, DC; school and play; his parents' deteriorating marriage-assumed names, parallel lives, and myriad Cold War menaces linger. Drawing from CIA training manuals and pop culture references alike, Healey's poetry is both intimate and claustrophobic. In these poems, the natural anxiety of childhood is compounded by the weight of both national and family secrets, and Healey draws deep parallels between the shaky foundations of truth in his past and the paranoia and obfuscation that envelops our nation's present.
"With skillfully rendered domestic detail and tension, Steve Healey's Safe Houses I Have Known discloses that there is scant buffer between civilian life and espionage. Rupture, as documented here, is silent-from private childhood shame, muted haiku of cartoon violence, to critical erasures of CIA interrogation protocols. Through such uneasy quiet, Healey's chilling collection confides that confli
Douglas Kearney
"Steve Healey's an N of 1: a poet whose father was a spy for the CIA. He's written a wonderful book that gets at the nature and difficulty of trust-not just a son's trust in his spy pops or in a family broken up by secrecy, but in the self when we know our bodies let us down, in the other when love is often fraught and contingent. Healey goes at the complexity of our attachments with a style and v
Bob Hicok
"Steve Healey's brilliant Safe Houses I Have Known is a riveting, unsparing account of his particular familial experience: having a father who was a CIA spy. The fractious effects of the family secret (revealed to Healey in early adolescence but felt throughout childhood) become our commonality. Through scrupulous intelligence, dark wit, and his generous yet wily imagination, Healey lays bare the
