In the Spaces Between Us

There is so much to feel and to learn about in this collection: a hotel monkey, an Alaskan moose, and a "tribunal of cows whose heads hang like lanterns" are just some of the vital animals that saunter across the pages of In the Spaces Between Us. The living world in Higgins Leach's hands feels expansive; and in exquisite poem after exquisite poem, she guides us over wild landscapes, through family histories and gently, into "what the dark reveals." However, it is the poet's consciousness that I am most drawn to; a consciousness that continually searches, questions, and is always, always profoundly humane.

-Susan Rich, author of Blue Atlas

Calm and open. That's how I feel reading these finely crafted poems of tree canopies, family dinners, rejuvenated shelter dogs, and neighbors "braided to each other / like radiant light between the leaves." In the spaces between us is love, connection, and leaps of understanding. How can we care for each other? This central question guides Higgins Leach. With her, we face failing glaciers, death. We also turn again and again with a spirit of hope to take in the sacred, the ineffable. When a child looks up and finds "without effort, I am more than I am," we do too.

-Deborah Bacharach, author of Shake & Tremor

Yvonne Higgins Leach fills In the Spaces Between Us with a lyrical, everyday grace, speaking of home, nature and family; animals wild, sheltered and abandoned; and with a compassionate heart that feels our shared predicament. Her keenly observed awareness of the "invisible obedience of the moon" pulls us along the tides, lapping at her island home, emanations from the departed, and the perplexities of an examined life. A quiet, ebullient joy to read, this collection is as gently paradoxical as life moving through time, place, and yes, those spaces in between.

-Susan Lynch, Vashon Island Poet Laureate (2019-2021) and author of Into the All Empty