Randolph Healy
March 5, 2024
ISBN 978-1-881163-73-2
$17.00
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Comprising forty-nine units, with a bespoke porch and optional exit through a bestiary, Randolph Healy’s The Electron-Ghost Casino has a décor ranging from the cerebral (all percentiles included) to the earthy. Notes of horror, intimacy, fractured histories, and joy echo from its chambers. Healy is the author of Green 532: Selected Poems 1983-2000 (Salt 2002) and other books and chapbooks celebrated by readers throughout the Anglophone poetry world. This is his first American book publication. Are some of his tunes unfamiliar? Don’t worry, or do. We may be out of time, but there’s still space. Dance.
Reviews & Such
- Review forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Issue 143, August 2024
- “Healy is a mathematician and treats maths and logic as languages to be used in poetry like any other, and through this asks us to reconsider what language, and, by extension, poetry is and can do.” –– Billy Mills in Elliptical Movements.
- “Randolph Healy has great sympathy for the only contingently coherent, whether it’s language, splintering into letters and sounds which seldom agree (but their argument is poetry), or his mother, who thankfully didn’t get parsed to atoms while working in a munitions factory in WW2. He’s a poet for whom the alarming, the utterly hilarious, and the loving are faces of the same dice, and his poems move by a series of joyful and mischievous flips whose logic eludes me and convinces me, every single time.”
––Peter Manson, author of Poems of Frank Rupture - “Randolph Healy shrinks the scale of the world and life, and every idea, image, and word becomes delicious. When you read the poem
“Solation,” notice how the /l/ sounds lull you into its ripples, and how the sharp /n/ sounds in “Ashen Riot” pierce the atmosphere. I feel tingling and alive while reading The Electron-Ghost Casino. It’s a gift to be given the grace to feel and experience so deeply.”
––Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat
- ran·dolph·in (răn-dŏlf ′ ĭn) n. 1. merman tailwalking in/on Dublin Bay/Bray/Bay of Biscay. 2. Poet with conical teeth. 3.a. Keeper of the wolf from the door. b. Or the wolf. c. Or the door. [OE. Randwulf < ON. Rannúlfr : rann, house or shield or rim + úlfr, wolf (see Old Norse RÁN [ˈrɒːn] goddess, personification of the sea; Old Irish RANN, RAND, quatrain, stanza of Irish poetry)].
ran·dolph·ing (răn-dŏlf ′ ĭng) v. -dolph·ed, -dolph·i g, -dolphs —intr. Executing linguistic, mathematical, poetical, typographical, fantastical high jinks in a consummately low-key way.
ran·dorph·in (răn-dŏrf ′ ĭn) n. 1. Any of a group of miniature brainy peptalks that activate receptors, causing an analgesic effect. 2. The whole box of chocolates. 3. The cat’s pajamas. 4. All your birthdays coming at once. 5a. Ne rotransmitter of liveliness. b. An abundance of which the reader takes away from this book.
––Mairéad Byrne, author of You Have to Laugh: New & Selected Poems
About the Author
Randolph Healy was born in Ayrshire, Scotland in 1956. Looking back in time, his family tree expands, while the population of the planet contracts. Thus he has a vast number of relatives, at various distances. He has written books and his work has appeared in magazines and anthologies. He founded Wild Honey Press in 1997. His average density is slightly less than that of water, which enables him to float when required. He is currently preparing a paper on “Sisyphus and the Importance of Routine.”
