Stay Safe
Emma Hine
Reviewed by Ali Hintz
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. Hine’s stable of characters includes three myth-making sisters, a mother with a brain tumor, suicidal suburban neighbors, a young couple in love, a lost astronaut from a post-Earth future, and a long-dead test pilot.
From a rather disorienting beginning, Hine’s myth-like world creates its own logic. In “Selkie,” the speaker convinces her younger sisters that their mother used to be a selkie, a seal that can shapeshift into a human and back again using her pelt as one would a coat. Her mother “wanted / to know what it felt like to be lost,” an urge echoed in other main characters. She would roam the beach at night, thinking how “the land was what remains / when the sea goes missing: the driftwood / remembered the water, the sand in the ground / remembered the ocean floor. Her body / always remembered her pelt.” This remembrance, whether of the sea in the mother’s case or the Earth in the astronaut’s, both haunts and humanizes Hine’s characters.
Perhaps the heart of the book lies in the lyrics of the pop song playing on the radio in “Hotel Sisters:” “We love each other, / we lose each other, we can’t / let each other go.” Hine reminds us that loss can’t be felt without love, that love is worth remembering. That love makes us human no matter how far we travel from home.