Stay Safe
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
At the center of this stellar collection are three sisters and their imaginative fear of grief. Their great-uncle was bitten by a shark, their mother has a brain tumor, their neighbor hangs himself from a tree—and to cope with these very real terrors, the oldest sister creates an intimate fantasy world. We hear stories of a mountain lion that slaughters a deer, a transparent body washed up on a beach, a selkie who ventures to shore and becomes their mother: “On land her pelt was heavy / like stewed velvet, so she taught herself / to take it off.” The sisters’ environment of ocean and sand, forests and farmhouses, forms a lush backdrop to many of these poems. But later, as the speaker ages, we find ourselves in the mountains, in an art museum, in a spacecraft where a recorded voice “has the soft accent of someone only a generation or two removed from Earth.” The voice in these poems is the perfect mix of grief and imagination, quiet and explosion. Stay Safe is delicate and extraordinary, a powerful debut.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exuberant debut, Hine weaves a complex family narrative around the constant presence of a story-loving mother and three sisters, who have "always called each other/ by the radio alphabet signs for initials:/ Echo, Sierra, and Juliett Hotel,/names to flare above bad weather." Hine pilots the reader upward, through images of constellations and galaxies, and then downward, into black water beyond the reach of light, "past glowing jellyfish,/ past lanterneyes, past species, the girls said,/ that over eons had invented their own light." Through the sisters' stories, sea and sky come to feel interchangeable, since "Surely space is just another underwater." The prose poem sequence "Echo Hotel" is a tour de force, tenderly and disturbingly spinning a family story of intergalactic travel: "This is it, folks, you say into the star-stitched quilt of deep space—the field of crumbling asteroids, the nebulas clustered like moths along the galaxy's bright spine." Throughout, Hine suggests the presence of hope, "To stay human you have to remember everything we have left." This excellent work offers a prayer for the current calamitous moment.
