"And Aeneas Stares into Her Helmet" on Philip Metres' Blog

I'm grateful to amazing poet Philip Metres for writing about my book of poems, And Aeneas Stares into Her Helmet (Carolina Wren Press 2009). Philip is author of Sand Opera, (Alice James Books, 2015). Thank you, Philip! He writes:

I've been reading Tiffany Higgins' And Aeneas stares into her helmet (Carolina Wren Press Press (2009), a book-length meditation on the wars of our recent age. Higgins does a remarkable discipline by staying with the war, measuring the extent of its merging in us, its emergence from us. Neither expose nor diatribe, Higgins stays with it, dances in time with it, in its time.

Since the recent imperial wars seem not to require anything more than our silence, such a poetic perseverance is itself an achievement; whatever the gain of having a professional army (and not a volunteer one), we collectively have lost by our greater distance from the brutalities of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War. We need to stop burying that brutality. The truths will out, Wikileaks or no Wikileaks, Assange or no Assange.

Here's a video I featured before, from Higgins, which explores the way the war is both with us and invisible to us. Watch the "Where is the War" video here

Read Philip Metres' blog post on And Aeneas Stares into Her Helmet here