Playful but ominous, 10 Mississippi reads like a game of hide-and-seek set in America’s rising floodwaters of text and technology.
Fluid, lively, and referential, 10 Mississippi samples language from many cultural tributaries, performing sequels of celebrated twentieth-century poems, darkly riffing on advertising slogans, tongue twisters, formulaic news reports, and everyone’s favorite twenty-six-letter sentence, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.†Like the proverbial river that is never the same twice, Healey’s poems channel the constant transformation of the modern world and embrace the human drama in all its absurd variety.