BY CANISIA LUBRIN
Emma Healey’s sophomore poetry collection, Stereoblind, is the result of six years spent wrestling with the illusion of simplicity, an illusion that came to light in part as a result of the poet’s own diagnosis of stereoblindness. “A normal person with a pair of regular, functioning eyes sees the world just one way at a time”, Healey says. “Their brain takes two separate images and merges them together somewhere in the visual cortex to form a single, coherent picture.” People with stereoblindness, by contrast, suffer “a little glitch … a lack of depth perception.” It was this glitch that, paradoxically, offered clarity and complexity to the poet’s vision.
The prose poems that comprise Healey’s new collection are emblematic of “the eerie symmetry of [the] past and present”, which plays out in “the places where [these things] seemed to split apart.” Through this process, “the familiar architecture” of the poet’s past becomes “spliced with brand-new developments.” The thematic concerns in Stereoblind intertwine in a network of insights on temporality, technology, sexuality and connectedness, mental illness, artistic life and alienation, and feminism.