Review by Jami Macarty

In Certain Shelter, Abbie Kiefer sensitively examines how personal and communal loss shape identity, focusing on a woman balancing responsibilities to her children and aging parents. The collection is a tribute to her late mother and reflects on the fading industries in Gardiner, Maine. Kiefer explores transitions from being cared for to caring for others and the granting of autonomy to her sons, alongside pivotal moments in her hometown, such as “My Friend Tells Me About the Last Day at the Bass Shoe Factory.”

As Kiefer examines the “human weight” of loss, weaving together her grief with the collective “sorrow” of her community, she is always “tender / toward relics—” She reveals vulnerability as she “Gently / attests to the nature / of contrast—” Her skill lies in expressing the entwined grief and joy of life, especially after loss. In “I’m So Tired,” she writes: “I had a mother and I miss her and I have joy / and the garden.”

Continuing her exploration of shared experience, Kiefer’s poems celebrate Yankee heritage and are “concerned with the ordinary” people whose labor and artisanry are often unnoticed and underappreciated. “In Praise of Minor,” Kiefer salutes minor poets “faithful to work that will meet / with quiet,” suggesting kinship with notable yet underrecognized Maine poet Edward Arlington Robinson. If Robinson, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is considered a minor poet, it invites reflection on the value of all voices in poetry. Kiefer highlights this idea in her six-section prose poem, “A Brief History of E. A. Robinson and the Train Station in Gardiner, Maine.” This poem addresses things that “falter against change” — the town that loses the paper mill and train station, residents who “abide in spareness,” and Robinson himself, who moved away from Gardiner. “But in his poems, he returns and returns.”

Ultimately, parts “hymn” and “wild shards,” Abbie Kiefer’s narrative-lyric poems will endure because “Ground that shakes / can also shelter.” And that’s the truth of this beautiful, tender-hearted debut.

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Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer. June Road Press, October 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.

Review by Jami Macarty

In Songs for the Land-Bound, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza sings of “memory, art, turbulence” in a woman’s relationship to motherhood, marriage, aging, writing, spirituality, and “wilderness.” Garcia-Mendoza’s assured and refined debut, divided into six bird-ornamented sections, documents the “complications” of her subjects by employing contrasting modes of discourse that illustrate the “fights between” and “the opposite effect” of dichotomous thinking, creating a dynamic interplay between coupling and countering within the choices of poetic form, linear organization, and noun constructions.

Garcia-Mendoza juxtaposes various forms: a nocturne counters an aubade, odes oppose an epithalamium, the prose of a haibun contrasts with the verse of a sonnet, the erasure found in a collage compares to the patchwork technique of a cento, and still lifes stand in contrast to “dioramas.” Within these forms, lines are often stanzaically organized in couplets or tercets, reinforcing the interplay of coupling and countering. This duality is also expressed in word pairings such as “the conditional, the subjunctive”; “relentlessness or restlessness”; and “bless & burn,” as well as through the progressions of three nouns: “starlings, selfies, sinkholes”; “soldier, poet, or king”; “color, time, light.” Gentle enjambment highlights the poet’s fine attention to the potential meanings that arise from additive and oppositional units of meaning.

Garcia-Mendoza’s narrative-lyric poems cycle “if, when, where” while considering “the carrion, the carry on, the carrying” that defines the life of a middle-aged woman. As the poet considers a “sense of life debt,” she acknowledges the “dread and marvel” of language, wilderness, and familylife, each seen as a “romance / with the unreliable,” “bearing / darkness.”

To counter the notion of “solastalgia,” the poet denies nothing but makes deliberate choices. She asserts: “My moral code is making”; “Revision means survival.” Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound are “illuminant over the scar.” Her poems of “wreckage strung with violets” — “music, all of it.”

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Songs for the Land-Bound by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza. June Road Press, September 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.