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Reconnaissance by Anne Higgins Blog Tour May 1-30

Hello everyone, we’ve got a new tour filling up for May 2015: Reconnaissance by Anne Higgins, a collection of poems published by Texture Press in Sept. 2014. Check out the early praise:

“‘The river flows by like a giant’s dream,/and if I dipped my hand in, what would come?’ writes Anne Higgins. Countless moments of wonder like this illuminate Reconnaissance, a collection that is both lovely and fierce. Elegant and precise descriptions of birdlife and gardens mingle with angry confrontations with illness and a tour de force poem about a catastrophic fire in a Catholic elementary school. A poet in full command of her lyric powers, Higgins also offers us jets of language play and splashes of Magritte-inspired surrealism. An eclectic collection of many pleasures and surprises.” — Lynn Levin, author of Miss Plastique “Anne Higgins is a first-class observer of the natural world and a poet with poise and grace. In this excellent collection, she charts the habits of birds, imagines the lives of French painters, and reflects vividly on her own childhood. The poems in Reconnaissance embody their title: they are ranging explorations reported to us with intelligence and insight.” —Ryan Teitman, author of Litany for the City “To say Anne Higgins is profound is to be embarrassingly reasonable. She comes alive in a sensory world liberated by ideas worthy of our love. Her excitement in living and dying changes all the complex problems turned to vexed questions. Hers is the predicament of a kind of faith otherwise forgotten in our cyber-fracture world. I’m beginning to think people are just born with faith in God (i.e., life, beauty, language, spectacle,) and if this is so, then the luckiest of them can take all that potential and show us what is possible.” —Grace Cavalieri, presenter for “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress,” on Vexed Questions

Early praise for the book can be found in the The Hollins Critic magazine: “Reconnaissance is Anne Higgins’s seventh poetry collection. In it, she reconnoiters her past, significant events in American history (the assassination of JFK, 9/11, a fire in which twenty-eight eight-year-olds died), her diminishing eyesight. (In “Another Blind Beggar” she informs us that there is “a grey footprint in the center of my vision, / a grey cat sits in the center of the field.” She writes about life as a nun and favorite pop songs. There are poems about birds, insects, and her mother. In short, this book maps an entire life, the life of a vibrant, intelligent, and sharply observant woman. “Morning yelps with cold,” she writes, and we feel and hear the charged air, become conscious of the exciting chill.” — Review by Kelly Cherry About the Poet:

Anne Higgins teaches at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Md. She is a member of the Daughters of Charity. Her poems have appeared in Commonweal, Yankee, Spirituality and Health, The Centrifugal Eye, and a variety of small magazines. Garrison Keillor has read two of her poems on “The Writers Almanac” – on 10/8/01 and 8/8/10. She is the author of six previous collections of poetry. Check out an interview with her by Susan Smith Nash. Author photo by Michael Hoover.

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