Memoir Magazine‘s 2025 Prize, Honorable Mention
Safe Handling (Moon Tide Press, 2024), a book-length poem by Rebecca Evans, is nothing short of transformative. The speaker and author are one in the same as Evans travels to Spokane, Washington with her oldest son for his upcoming heart surgery. Extending across twenty-six pages, this sprawling poem treads through the struggles of motherhood and disability with poignance and passion, spoken directly from the heart.
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“Rebecca Evans is a voice of fierce clarity. Her work continues to sing.” ~ Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist
“Safe Handling is heart wrenching and beautiful and dare I say: perfect. A mother’s love, her profound love, wrapped in words that will leave you holding your breath. Rebecca Evans has written a magnificent poem about the human heart – her son’s heart – and I have no doubt – none – that she will move and open yours.” ~ Amy Ferris, author, Mighty Gorgeous, A Little Book About Messy Love
Safe Handling is a gorgeous long poem and love song for her sons, a window into the life of a mother fleeing a dangerous marriage into a safe house and the strain of her son’s many surgeries and questions. Evans is a force of nature and an inspiration. This book is a survival guide for anyone whose children have suffered and all of us who need light along the way. ~ Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate
“In her latest work, Safe Handling, Rebecca Evans has created an extended poetic meditation on love and caregiving, motherhood and childhood, along with an exploration of the relentless surgeries one of her sons must endure. The poems ask, “How the human heart/ endures,” and “Don’t we die a little all the time?” The answer, question by question, is love. The answer is tenderness and unavoidable struggle. The answer is uncertainty and a child’s heartfelt questions. Safe Handling balances the push and pull of life through a formal use of counterpoint—a form that echoes the very foundations of this poem: love and survival. Safe Handling is a meditation on love, and then again love, and yet again, as ever, love.” ~ Brian Turner (The Wild Delight of Wild Things)
Safe Handling (Moon Tide Press, 2024) is one of those narratives. A terrifying time, a beautiful time, when my oldest son, Zach and I, traveled to Spokane for one of his heart surgeries. ~R. Evans
Description: Safe Handling, a collection-length poem, weaves family and heartbreak as Rebecca Evans and her disabled son navigate our challenging medical industry, seeking out-of-state heart surgery. Evans, a single mother to three, must leave her other children behind, wrestling motherhood guilt with mother bear fierceness. Throughout, Safe Handling layers our human longings—to feel safe, to know oneself, to deeply love despite our fear of loss.
