Review: Abbie Kiefer
On Certain Shelters by Abbie Kiefer
by Tyler Truman Julian
Abbie Kiefer’s forthcoming collection Certain Shelter is a moving exploration of abundance. In the world of Certain Shelter, a near facsimile of small-town Maine, abundance manifests as harvest and nostalgia, cancer and grief. Many threads weave this concept of abundance with overabundance, and Kiefer dives into it fully by assigning her speaker the difficult task of poet-recorder as she reports on the state of life in a rural, blue-collar town in flux. The town’s shift from plenty to decay mirrors the speaker’s mother who succumbs to an overabundance of cancerous cells. In well-crafted poems, ranging in form and mode from prose poems to couplets to abstract, Kiefer blends craft, story, and history to build a beautiful and moving collection.
In “A Brief History of Tarceva,” Kiefer’s speaker explores the dichotomy of abundance that spreads throughout the collection:
Tarceva (erlotinib) was developed to treat metastatic non-small
cell lung cancer in patients with an active EGFR mutation who
have never smoked. Only about a third of patients have this
mutation. My mom’s oncologist finds it, tells her What luck.
In a trial, patients using Tarceva had a median survival rate
of 8.7 months. Tarceva can cause rash, lack of appetite. More
strangely, it also makes my mom’s eyelashes grow long and
dense. The nurse says she’s jealous as she trims them with suture
scissors. You’re like a Kardashian. My mom doesn’t have time
for reality television; she doesn’t know the Kardashians. Her
lashes, when she blinks, look so heavy to lift.
This personal, emotional core of the collection is informed by the love and disappointment experienced by the speaker in the poems reflecting on her small hometown in Maine. There’s perseverance in this community, informed by shared values and memory, but these make the loss of community and decay of the town even more painful. The speaker knows, doggedly, there’s little to do but “To make. To make do or do without. To trust your own two / hands, maybe too much” (“A Brief History of Yankee Thrift, Yankee Ingenuity, and Yankee Work Ethic”). There’s nostalgia here, but also realism, hope but also distrust. She continues, “To hear a person / say work and swear he said worth. To do. To do. To abide in spareness and rarely be spared.” A person or a whole community could have done everything right, for example, never smoking as in “A Brief History of Tarceva” or embracing the American Dream as in “A Brief History of Yankee Thrift, Yankee Ingenuity, and Yankee Work Ethic”, and still will “rarely be spared.” This reality cultivates a grief that permeates Certain Shelter, grief for a mother lost to cancer and grief for a town lost to the outsourcing of labor to more affordable overseas markets.
Both “A Brief History of Tarceva” and “A Brief History of Yankee Thrift, Yankee Ingenuity, and Yankee Work Ethic” are prose poems and show Kiefer’s attention to form. Kiefer frequently utilizes the prose form to report, to share facts, to clarify and commentate and she turns to other forms to complicate and explore the community she paints so vividly through prose. In “Resolutions,” Kiefer’s speaker reflects on parenting without the guidance of a mother and how life’s abundance can feel overwhelming:
Stop calculating: If I were the one to die,
could you afford a good sitter? Someone
who would find adventures—
streams and boulders, trees for climbing.
Who would urge our boys with all the ease
I lacked: Go. Yes, go. What’s the worst
That can happen?
Kiefer’s line work is on display here. Enjambment always works in her favor, and each individual like functions both independently and with what comes before and after, resulting in rich and textured poems. This complex line work is extended into an experimental space in poems like “Self-Portrait as the Safe Deposit Vault in the Vacant First Trust.” As in “Resolutions,” “Self-Portrait as the Safe Deposit Vault in the Vacant First Trust” works on many levels. Metacommentary is employed to align the speaker with the town, causing her loss to become the town’s loss and vice-versa, and structurally, the poem works like a stereoscope, with two images, built on either side of the page, creating one larger image:
I only wanted to
carry out the good work.
Be a two-ton slab
shut fast against trouble.
There’s hubris in being
built to withstand.
I promised to hold
Everything. Now I’ve lost
even memory:
the particular weight of a
pocket watch or passport—
accumulations of a life
gone.
A straight read of this poem gives you the complete picture, but each margin works independently as well, which adds layer upon layer, weight upon weight, to a poem that explores the pressure of time and memory that weighs on an individual feeling unanchored amid immense loss.
So what can be done with this weighted grief at the intersection of abundance and overabundance and the waste that it results in? Nodding to lyrical and confessional poetry, Keifer’s emphasis on an ever-present first-person speaker points to the responsibility of the poet as recorder. At the beginning of the collection’s second section, Kiefer invokes the legacy of Maine poet E.A. Robinson who wrote of a fictionalized version of his hometown, where “Its residents falter against change. Against their own failings… / the people endure or they don’t. You can / empathize or not. E.A. isn’t kind. He isn’t unkind, either” (“A Brief History of E.A. Robinson and the Train Station in Gardiner, Maine”). Kiefer’s speaker and her hometown mirror E.A. Robinson and his hometown. Reality is blurry, but truth is explored as a result of a poet taking on the subject of home. Utilizing quatrains, Kiefer expounds on grief and poetry through “I’m So Very Tired”:
of writing all these sad, sad poems. As if my life
is only a meditation on its own end. I mean,
I do think often of mortality. But also I’m among
such generous pleasures. Five kinds of tea…
it should feel like wild indulgence, like overabundance,
except he loves in a way that says This is your due.
I have hurt and I have sisters who carry the same
hurt and we share the carrying of it. We share jokes
too, like when one of us shakes a fist skyward
and huffs Carol!, exasperated at our mom
for dying and leaving us to figure out all this
hard stuff for ourselves, like what should we do
about these defiant kids and were we defiant too?
Did we turn out okay? Oh Carol. We miss you.
Can I say that here, reader? In this poem about being
less melancholy? Because it is solace to say it plainly.
I had a mother and I miss her and I have joy
and a garden. The turkeys amble around it.
I’ve learned to care for plants, to know them
by leaf and bloom.
The poet’s way of parsing out grief from nostalgia and determining what to do with those emotions is through writing. In a rural space slowly wasting away or a family missing its central figures, the poet must fill the empty space with words to make sense of it all.
The power of Certain Shelter lies in its clarity: Kiefer’s clear-eyed speaker, fearless engagement with lyrical and confessional poetry, and sharp use of form. The threads Kiefer weaves of small-town life, rural decline, family illness, and parenting ultimately knit together a story that’s beautiful and well-defined, even as the emotions she explores are nebulous and personal. Certain Shelters is a must read for anyone who has known loss, but it’s so much more than a grief memoir or an elegy. It’s a glimpse into daily American life in a changing, wider world and a call to action for writers everywhere to write their own true story.
In case you missed it—here is Abbie Kiefer’s poem from The Shore: