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