You couldn’t have a more timely title for a book released during a pandemic than Emma Hine’s poetry collection Stay Safe. And it’s the perfect book to curl up with these days because while there’s grief and a bit of terror in the poems there is also wonder, sometimes delivered in twists that take you to a completely unexpected and delightful place. In the poem “Spell,” for example, a swath of dead aspens and then later a tragic car accident turn out not to be what they seem, the trees and driver both alive: “a red truck in flight over a mountain,/ landing gently; moths about to open/ like white flowers; empty-handed/ trees about to fill again with leaves.” Hines and Stay Safe won the 2019 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and the book is available here.
Kathy Davis 