Shelter in Place by Rob Hardy

Powerful work, infused with beauty and grace from one of Minnesota’s talented poets. Rob Hardy is a treasure.

–Cathy Wurzer, Morning Edition Host, Minnesota Public Radio, and Founder of the End in Mind Project

When the future, especially under the influence of pandemic, “feels like unclaimed baggage,” Rob Hardy shows us “it’s hard to let go of absence.” In this lovely small collection of poems, dread is the catalyst for new life, and absence is metamorphosed into the new small miracles present all around.

–Emilio DeGrazia, author of What Trees Know

Slender in size, Hardy’s new collection is weighty in its felicitous and fearless examination of the present moment. Shelter in Place offers “singing in the wake of the storm/a fugue of chromatic juncos,” which transitions to the beautiful fragility of aftermath, when “winter’s white tune/is taken up by the wild plum.” Hardy uses elegance and restraint to rein in a wild inventiveness of observations, at once sensitive and learned, about human nature and the natural world. Shelter in Place will long delight readers with its lucidity, poignancy, humor, and humanity.

–Leslie Schultz, author of Concertina