The Safety of Small Things

"Jane Hicks is one of contemporary poetry's best recorders of the passing of time, both its ravages and its blessings. The poems in The Safety of Small Objects embrace the paradoxes we must live through: even when they recount brutal cancer treatments, funeral planning with an aged mother, or visiting a gravesite, there is nevertheless lots of dancing. Hicks possesses a rare ability to hold up an ordinary object or experience and to illuminate its transcendent qualities, as when she writes in the title poem about the smallest things, chipmunks, an inch worm, fungus, and how they all "lead to an unseen world that flourishes/ while I sleep." She is heir to the voice and vision of Jim Wayne Miller, Kathryn Stripling Byer, and Fred Chappell, and with the arrival of The Safety of Small Objects, it feels increasingly clear that Jane Hicks sits among Appalachia's most important poets."—Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place

"These poems are elegiac, yet there is a beautiful amberlike glow within them and, as with amber, they preserve, not only one life, but a time and a place. The Safety of Small Things is further proof that Jane Hicks is one of our country's finest poets."—Ron Rash, poet, short story writer, novelist and the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University

"For more than twenty years, Jane Hicks has been an indispensable voice in the Appalachian literary tradition. One of the few breakthrough feminist poets of her generation, Hicks teaches us that a woman and her place are never separate. Just as the natural world of East Tennessee is both fierce and tender, and cannot be controlled, so too is the woman's body, so too is this woman's life. In The Safety of Small Things, Hicks delivers us the next part of that lesson, difficult though it is: the threat of death is also natural, fierce, tender, and completely out of our charge. The earth does not wait for us to grieve, and so we must, as the poet writes, take our refuge in 'the unseen world' that flourishes even as we sleep. This book is more than wise, it is necessary."—Rebecca Gayle Howell, coeditor of What Things Cost: an anthology for the people