Josh Healey’s first book Hammertime: Poems and Possibilities (OMAI/First Wave Press) is about journeys: personal, geographic, and communal. Divided into three sections – Homegrown, Heartland, and Hammertime – the book brings together Healey’s stories and reflections into a collection that is sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious. From the contradictions of his DC childhood to the politics of race, sex, and hip-hop, this is the poetry of today’s America.
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“Hammertime is both song and searchlight, and Josh Healey is exploring a complex world and his place in it. In so doing, he has made beauty out of the poems’ very search for themselves, in the poignant conversations with his grandfather, his celebration of his hometowns, in his starkly articulated rants against the evils of racism, sexism, and his own privilege. The book is a wonderful coming out song…a most noteworthy and auspicious debut.” – Roger Bonair Agard, author, Tarnish and Masquerade
“Soulful and searching, self-critical and wise, Josh Healey’s poetry collection is cause for celebration. There are no false borders here; politics and love, geography and guilt, are all subway stops in the same luminous city of words. — Adam Mansbach, author, The End of the Jews
“Josh Healey writes with a certain sleight of hand – laughs tucked into dirges, smiles taking shelter in prayer – he is deft like that. Like the Hood meets Big Ten. Like finding afikomen, reading Hammertime is both solemn and joyous. It is for white boy feminists and the black girls who sweat their style. This book signals a crossing of borders, at just the right time.” — Chinaka Hodge, author, For Girls With Hips
“All good political poetry is love poetry. With Hammertime, Josh Healey has written the world an open-mouthed kiss, recognizing that for all its flaws, for all its obstacles, the world is ours to love and ours to change.” — Kyle Myhre, emcee, El Guante’s Haunted Studio Apartment
