Safety Razor combines personal lyrics with translations from Old Norse, its taut poems running like high-wires between the poles of terror and joy, danger and safety, erudition and naivety. Mingling subjects as diverse as dinosaur bones and diacritical markers, Vikings and mothering, Safety Razor pits cultural and historical flotsam against the intimate and the academic. Be prepared for a voice that is both vulnerable and scientific as it explores the exploitation of Jumbo the Elephant, how a baby experiences a tornado, or a Viking demonstration of poetic prowess through vomit and blood. Every line in Osborne’s sharp verse is like a “pin dipped in tobacco spit,” something inked with precision and grit.

Emily Osborne’s poetry, short fiction and Old Norse-to-English verse translations have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Vallum, CV2, The Polyglot, The Literary Review of Canada, Barren Magazine, and Althingi: The Crescent and the Northern Star. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Biometrical (Anstruther Press). In 2018, Emily won The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry. After spending the first 22 years of her life in London, ON, Emily moved to the UK to complete an MPhil and PhD at Cambridge University, in Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic Literature. Currently, Emily lives on Bowen Island, BC, with her husband and two young sons. Safety Razor is her debut book of poetry.

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