PASSING

“Between little corner taquerias/ and Thai home cooking joints,” Eloise Klein Healy renders a post-modern Los Angeles, weaving elegies, lyrics and meditations into a provocative assemblage. She anchors the book with poems exploring gender identity and social relations, meditating on the Civil Rights movement (“our unnatural disaster over race”), the scourges of breast cancer and AIDS. She elegizes sister-poet Lynda Hull and honors the “oldest human assignment”—burying a parent. Read this collection for its wisdom, rage, and wry wit, for Healy’s intelligent probing into contemporary culture. —Robin Becker, author of The Horse Fair