The Hive, Susan Stewart's second collection of poetry, brings together new work into three sections that telescope out from private speech to the public and more deeply historical language of the witness. Recurring poems explore the possibilities of language as ceremony while others are rewritings of romanticism and its places.

Of Susan Stewart's first collection, Yellow Stars and Ice, James Cory wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that it is "a reading experience to exult in," and Library Journal stated that "there is magic as well as finesse in this beautiful collection."