Countdown to Caduceus

CADUCEUS is a full-length collection of poems scheduled for publication in February of 2012 by WordTech Communications / David Robert Books. It is 100 pages long and contains 48 poems in 6 sections: Lovers, Skeptics, Preachers, Believers, Metaphors, and The Voice of God. As the publisher's back-of-the-book blurb has it: “Heartbreak and faith are the twin strands threading through Caduceus by Sørina Higgins: a book of voices, messages, personas, layered texts, ancient tales, and contemporary feeling.” In this volume, I try on the roles of many characters both ancient and modern to express dilemmas of my own, of my loved ones, or of my times.

Please let me know if I can offer a poetry reading, discussion, or workshop at your church, home, school, coffeeshop, bookstore, or other venue.

This book has been graciously endorsed by three superstar poets: Jeanne Murray Walker, Luci Shaw, and Dana Gioia. Here is what they had to say:

“Here is a remarkable young poet who connects our small, personal twentyfirst century stories with the great, overarching cultural narratives. It’s always our own time and place Sørina Higgins writes about, but against a backdrop of Greek myths and Biblical stories which lend these private confessions astonishing power. When she asks ‘Oh Lord, will you tell me, what good is grief?’ she might as well be Job; her interrogation is that passionate. Posing her wild human questions with great skill in some of the oldest English verse forms, she has written a musical, heartbreaking, timely and timeless book.”

—Jeanne Murray Walker

“Sørina Higgins takes the stuff of myth, legend, history and mystery and pours it into her visceral poems, many of them formal. Where others might see the ordinary, she translates what might seem mundane or insignificant into something extraordinarily arresting. Here is a poet of a deep, dissecting and penetrating faith.”

—Luci Shaw

“Sørina Higgins is an ambitious, young poet who defies easy classification. Her work embraces the lyric and the narrative, the sexy and the sacred. Hers is a capacious imagination trying to make sense of a world full of both heartbreak and wonder which she views with a tough-minded clarity and vast compassion.”

—Dana Gioia

This book will be available on amazon sometime in February; check back then! Meanwhile, here is the first poem in the book, which kind of sums it up:


Prologue: Dramatis Personæ

My little heel-wings are not made of feathers:

they are made of tongues. Their voices flap

around my feet, hiss through my veins, and coil

their noisy helix on my heraldic staff.

They whisper I am, I say, making me

play all the characters this writer writes.

I am the dead man on the field; I am

the bird, the beast, the god, the groom, the bride.

I am a hypocrite, a metaphor,

a myth. If every wing-word was hermetic,

lovers, skeptics, Romans, Christians took

my secret voices public, grew frenetic

in praise of their high places and their gods—

and in the end, their clamor just might run me mad.

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