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Launching off from subjects as varied as Tinder and animal testing, Emma Healey’s provocative collection of prose poems explores the urgent themes of feminism, mental illness, sexuality, artistic practice, alienation, connection, technology, and time.
In Stereoblind, no single thing is ever perceived in just one way. Shot through with asymmetry and misconception, the prose poems in Emma Healey’s second collection describe a world that’s anxious and skewed, but still somehow familiar — where the past, present, and future overlap, facts are not always true, borders are not always solid, and events seem to write themselves into being. An on-again, off-again real estate sale nudges a quartet of millennial renters into an alternate universe of multiplying signs and wonders; an art show at Ontario Place may or may not be as strange and complex (or even as “real”) as described; the collusion of a hangover and a blizzard carry our narrator on a trancelike odyssey through Bed Bath &Beyond. Using a diverse range of subjects — from pharmaceutical research testing to Tinder — to form an inventory of ontological disturbance, Healey delves into moments when the differences between things disappear, and life exceeds its limits.
“Tune into an inner world the size of a city, where the sound of time moving is a lot like the hiss of an audio tape being rewound and played back over and over. Here the speaker wants to hear: what’s true, what’s real, what’s hers. She seeks the essential shape of life itself — an imagined, elusive symmetry — with one eye fixed on the material and the other spun in toward a private screen. Stereoblind is incisive, vulnerable, brutal, and full, ultimately, of love.” — Damian Rogers