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." | Stay Safe by Emma Hine, Paperback | Indigo Chapters