Rita Ann Higgins has spent four decades writing about Galway kitchens, bus routes and welfare offices with a comic timing that turns sharp. This retrospective gathers that work in one volume.

Readical Key Points

• New and selected poems chosen from a dozen books published over four decades, from Goddess on the Mervue Bus (1986) to The Long Weekend (2024), plus new work
• Subjects include family, women's lives, work, money and power
• Paperback, 352 pages, Bloodaxe Books, 2026

Higgins writes in plain, spoken language, often in the voices of the people her poems watch: neighbors, clerks, mothers, officials. The jokes arrive fast and the anger underneath them arrives a line later. Across the selections, the poems follow working-class and women's lives in the west of Ireland and ask who gets heard, who gets ignored and what it costs to talk back.

A single volume of this size lets readers follow the voice from its first book through its most recent, then into the new poems. It suits readers of contemporary Irish poetry, of political and social verse, and of poets who use humor as a way in rather than a way out. The comic timing of the first book is still here, and so is the edge.

About the Author

Born in Galway in 1955, Rita Ann Higgins has published poetry and prose with Bloodaxe and Salmon Press, and has also written plays, among them The Plastic Bag and The Colossal Longing of Julie Connors. Her awards include the Peadar O'Donnell Award (1989) and the Living Poets Society Award (2021), and she belongs to Aosdána.

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