My ninth book of poetry , Not Only/But Also, was released this week.
The publisher is Duck Lake Books!
Here is the first poem in the book:
What You Can’t Know When You’re Young
How the big girl with the baby face
turns into the woman with bags under her eyes
and the fine skins lined with eyelash thin wrinkles.
How you become the sandwich memory keeper
who tells your cousin’s children about your grandmother
and knows that someday it will be important to them.
How the details of weddings and funerals,
who was there and what they said,
what songs they sang by the piano in the basement,
how those things matter.
How it matters what those Mennonite wives and mothers, sisters in law,
wore and said in the kitchen while they got the meal together,
always jello and creamed corn on the menu.
You can’t know these things when you are young:
how the necks of women become crepe draped,
how you can see the laughing eighteen year old
behind the laughing sixty six year old:
same person—same person.
Here's what my poet friend Kate Daniels said about my book:
In Anne Higgins’ new collection, Not Only, but Also, I love the forthright speech she uses to
conjure a late life exegesis of nearly seven decades of lived experience. Using
ordinary language and mundane settings, Higgins carries us with her to the many
thin places she encounters in daily life.
“A humming in the silent air” is what she calls those mysterious moments
when mortal and eternal time temporarily divide, and give a fleeting glimpse of
what lies just beneath, beyond the surfaces of daily life. After a long life of religious vocation and
devotion to poetry, this poet finds thin places almost anywhere: in line at
Starbucks, a child’s chalk drawing of a hopscotch grid, “a box of Whitman’s
floral mints,” the surprising, untamed sprawl of Emily Dickinson’s handwriting,
or in the “chewed up lung throats” of prostitutes “calling hoarsely” to their
customers. “All our life we’ve walked through it,” she says in “We’re Being
Watched,” “The border between this world/And the other one.”
Kate
Daniels
If you’re interested in purchasing the book, here are the ordering details:
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