“Lorraine Healy has written poems of ferocity—and because there is no true love without terror, she has written a book-length love poem to Buenos Aires that carries us to the brink of grief and back again. In these poems all the “territories of last” leave their deep and burning imprint upon us. Healy’s language doesn’t let go—how can it when in the world of the disappeared there is no innocence, no undoing. It is not often that a voice of such authenticity and passion makes such a stunning debut.”
—Anne Marie Macari
“Her painful evocations of Argentina during the dirty war (she grew up in Buenos Aires), her re-creations of Irish history (where her maternal ancestors lived and died), her tender poems of love and family, her acute eye for detail and her mind for clarity, her powerful, sensuous and humane imagination, her language full of surprises, make Lorraine Healy one of the finest emerging poets I know. Yes, the personal is the political—and the political is the personal. When I read The Habit of Buenos Aires I feel this deep in my bones, and with deep gratitude.”
—Alicia Ostriker
“Lorraine Healy has drawn the title of her always powerful and consistently stunning collection of poems, The Habit of Buenos Aires, from an epigraph by Eavan Boland: “What I had lost/ was not land/ but the habit of land.” Many of the poems in this collection echo the Peron years, and the long years of anguish—under the military junta—that held Argentina in their grip (Healy was born in Buenos Aires and lived there into her late twenties). This volume is both a personal record and a poetic autobiography fixed in time and place, and yet these poems gather to form a spiritual and political accounting as well. They also chart the cartography of a land slowly being lost to violence and lies and corruption; the poet, in the act of writing these poems, seeks to make her claim—a new claim, a poetic claim—on the land that was once her home. Muscular and immediate, these poems are resonant with superb details that allow, even at their darkest moments, an exceptional intimacy between the poet and her readers.”
—David St. John
