At the center of this stellar collection are three imaginative sisters who have grown up in a world colored by loss and anticipatory grief, painting their lives with great swathes of anxiety and sadness.
We hear stories of a great-uncle bitten by a shark, a lion who slaughters a deer, a tornado, fleeing horses, and a boy who hangs himself from a tree. To counter these terrors and to fill the void, the sisters create an intimate secret fantasy world, the most touching of which is the big sister's tale of the selkie: "On land her pelt was heavy/like stewed velvet, so she taught herself/ to take it off." Later, the sisters discover what looks like a sealskin on the beach. They begin to cry. In the first part of the book, the ocean and sand form a lush backdrop to these poems. Later we find ourselves in a spacecraft where the librarian "has the soft accent of someone only a generation or two removed from Earth." Here, the interactions revolve around the father, though his presence too is dream-like. The voice in these poems is the perfect mix of grief and imagination, quiet and explosion. The book is delicately extraordinary.
Industry Reviews
Shortlisted for 2022 Reading the West Book Awards
Poets & Writers, "Galley Crush"
Library Journal, "Books and Authors to Know: Poetry Titles to Watch 2021"
"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 [their] initials:/ Echo, Sierra, and Juliett Hotel,/names to flare above bad weather.'. . . .This excellent work offers a prayer for the current calamitous moment."
-Publishers Weekly, starred review
"A Kathryn A. Morton Prize winner, debuter Emma Hine's edgily conversational Stay Safe (Sarabande, Jan.) depicts three young sisters and their imaginative ways of warding off grief."
-"Books and Authors to Know: Poetry Titles to Watch 2021," Library Journal
"Three sisters are at the heart of Hine's debut, which catalogues family stories and terrors. The speakers of these poems forge a fantasy world that combines imagination and grief."
-"Fall 2020 Announcements: Poetry," Publishers Weekly
"Emma Hine's debut poetry collection Stay Safe is a fiercely, lovingly crafted book that celebrates the endurance of the human spirit in the face of an ever-dimming future."
-Arkansas International
"Throughout her impressive debut, Hine refuses to stabilize the reader amid the many dangers she describes, leaving them on beautiful, if ultimately shaky ground."
-RHINO, online
"These poems are imaginative and sweeping, but still let us touch the ground."
-"Lyric Essentials: Jihyun Yun Reads Emma Hine," The Sundress Blog, online
"Stay Safe is a crochet of excavation and design. As surprising as bird-eating whitetails, Emma Hine's imaginative appetite bewilders and delights. The poet teaches us that we can become something more, something other, both with and against protection, but not without extraordinary curiosity and the willingness to be transformed."
-Salt Hill Journal, online
"Emma Hine's debut poetry collection, "Stay Safe," is a dreamy, haunting exploration of love and loss. Her poems wander between the literal and the esoteric, loosely drawn together by a narrative that ebbs and flows throughout the book. At its heart is the story of a family who suffers a string of tragedies - some dramatic and surreal, others intimate and benign."
-Seven Ponds, online
"Simply said: this is the renewable energy we've been waiting for. So attuned are these poems to their introspective nature and terrors of the self, their wild narratives, and linguistic spells, this book begins to feel like its own solar farm: each page, a panel of skyshine and wonderments."
-Major Jackson
"Emma Hine's remarkable debut claims as its title an impossible injunction: stay safe. What does it mean to stay, to remain, to arrest a state of being that is fully immune to danger, which is to say, to living? Hine circles this impossibility in poems of dark lyricism, ones commanding our attention to the body at risk: its hidden danger zones, its collisions and impacts, its relentless hurtle forward. Like the speaker in these poems, we're made to understand we're 'not strong, not / permanent, just holding.' Stay Safe limns personal and collective griefs with searing insight, showing us how mythology and language can transmute fear and loss into something redemptive, something of strange beauty. This is a collection that is startling in its revelations and the latitudes it traverses, and Hine is a tremendous voice reminding us what it is to mark an existence and to endure."
-Jenny Xie
"Emma Hine's debut collection Stay Safe is like a rumble strip alerting her readers to potential dangers ahead, awakening us to the 'quivering systems of energy and grief' we traverse. The coming-of-age poems ripple with ominous sexuality and an awareness of loss ahead. Family history is transformed into near fairytale, and vice versa. 'Expect sometimes to be lonely,' a mother says in one of many poems charged with both love and loss. Hine's gift for metaphor marks these quiet hallucinations and keeps them free of sentimentality even when they pulse with feeling: 'Waves touch shore in little habitual apologies.' Taken together and singly, these poems become 'a torch into the tunnel-end of risk.'"
-Catherine Barnett
