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. ..".What the Right Hand Knows [by] Tom Healy is a first book poet who has a clear and urgent style, a straightforward ownership of his emphatically lyrical choices. ... [T]hese are poems about being off-beam, asymmetrical, off-balance in a deaf ear, the left and right hand at odds in their knowledge, the world tipped one way, then another.--Carol Muske-Dukes "The Huffington Post" (10/12/2009 12:00:00 AM) Laconic yet passionate and sparely personal, the poems in this first book set urbanity and unfolding tragedy in common words and slow-moving, short lines. Healy's finest moments make him spare, elegiac and wry all at the same time: 'What do we do when we hate our bodies?/ A good coat helps.' ...-- "Publishers Weekly" (10/19/2009 12:00:00 AM) "Laconic yet passionate and sparely personal, the poems in this first book set urbanity and unfolding tragedy in common words and slow-moving, short lines. Healy's finest moments make him spare, elegiac and wry all at the same time: 'What do we do when we hate our bodies?/ A good coat helps.' ..."-- Publishers Weekly What the Right Hand Knows [by] Tom Healy is a first book poet who has a clear and urgent style, a straightforward ownership of his emphatically lyrical choices. [T]hese are poems about being off-beam, asymmetrical, off-balance in a deaf ear, the left and right hand at odds in their knowledge, the world tipped one way, then another. Carol Muske-Dukes, The Huffington Post " Publishers Weekly" The Huffington Post" " What the Right Hand Knows [by] Tom Healy is a first book poet who has a clear and urgent style, a straightforward ownership of his emphatically lyrical choices. [T]hese are poems about being off-beam, asymmetrical, off-balance in a deaf ear, the left and right hand at odds in their knowledge, the world tipped one way, then another. Carol Muske-Dukes, The Huffington Post ."..What the Right Hand Knows [by] Tom Healy is a first book poet who has a clear and urgent style, a straightforward ownership of his emphatically lyrical choices. ... [T]hese are poems about being off-beam, asymmetrical, off-balance in a deaf ear, the left and right hand at odds in their knowledge, the world tipped one way, then another. --Carol Muske-Dukes, The Huffington Post “A wave of spontaneous greeting and implacable fluid motion breaks over these remarkable poems. Stirring up the ironic riptides of Stevie Smith, Vergilian /Georgics /and Catullus, the wave is revelation: ‘the necessities of rescue and surrender.’ If ‘Pindar said there’d be horses in heaven,’ Tom Healy imagines a flawed paradise here on earth—each poem an earthy lyrical miracle— ‘our salt and work—/ the stubborn questions/ we endlessly/ give names to.’ /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) “The electric immediacy of these poems is an assault on silence, a gunshot fired across the bow of genteel decorous well-mannered lying and silence. At times, but seldom, they give us something sharp-edged but more comfortable (e.g., a portrait of Lauren Bacall choosing fruit). I love how everything here ‘haunts us with choice.’ This is a superb book.” (Frank Bidart) Tom Healy is a writer, poet, and chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which oversees the Fulbright program worldwide. Tom's first book,  What the Right Hand Knows , was a finalist for the 2009 L.A. Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. His most recent book,  Animal Spirits , a collaboration with tattoo artist Duke Riley, was published by Monk Books in 2013. His poems have appeared in a variety of national and international journals, including  The   Paris Review , Boston Review , and  Yale Review . His work has appeared in several anthologies, including  Love Rise Up: Poems of Social Justice, Protest, and Hope  and  IOU: New Writing on Money . Healy is a contributor to  The Huffington Post  and  Creative Time Reports . He was awarded the New York City Arts Award by Mayor Michael Bloomberg for leadi