Stay Safe: Poems (First edition.)

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: "e;On land her pelt was heavy / like stewed velvet, so she taught herself / to take it off."e; 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 "e;has the soft accent of someone only a generation or two removed from Earth."e; 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.