The Inheritance of Grief and Work: Abbie Kiefer’s “Certain Shelter”

Abbie Kiefer’s debut poetry collection Certain Shelter captures the feeling of returning home to find something similar but not quite, something that has somehow become foreign or lost, and the messy grieving of what—or who—once made home. The range through which these poems explore the ideas of shelter and home, and the varied forms these concepts can take, have such breadth and depth, letting the reader consider what these ideas mean for them even once finished reading.  

For the speaker, shelter is in part a family history—the “Yankee work ethic,” “waste-not,” and the labor of “even the third-graders” picking at harvest. But there is contrast and elegy for the speaker, who acknowledges the stark contrast of her own experience. “I never had an after-school job,” she says, commenting on her “lack of practice with an empty basket.” There is an inherited guilt in this juxtaposition for the speaker, in the objects of labor not “stir[ing her] to sing.” In the poem “A Brief History of Agriculture in Aroostook County, Maine,” she asks, “What does that say about me?” There is simultaneous familiarity and foreignness to her family’s stories. Perhaps my favorite poem in this collection is “A Brief History of Yankee Thrift, Yankee Ingenuity, and Yankee Work Ethic,” where the ghosts of this lineage of labor echo easily and dangerously into an all too familiar workaholism, which rarely fulfills its promises—where familial legacy morphs into a haunting: “hear[ing] a person say work and swear he said worth. To do. To do. To abide in spareness and rarely be spared.”  

Shelter becomes manifest for the speaker through place, particularly in towns devastated by the loss of industry. Through the setting of small-town Maine, Kiefer examines the way life is transformed after the closing of a town mill, and even more so personally after the loss of the speaker’s mother. Through environment, Kiefer parallels economic loss and personal loss to speak on the displacement of grief, creating a safe distance to speak on the challenges of moving forward after loss. While abandoned locations are repurposed and given a kind of new life,  skepticism surfaces in the speaker’s voice as she says, “Architects, those optimists, call this revival.” Can sheltering places be so simply manufactured, or revitalized? Can a place that once sheltered truly become a shelter again within a landscape of loss? 

The most devastating shelter the speaker loses is her mother. Through pop culture poems, the speaker approaches her grief at a slant. The result is intimacy without sentimentality, a world for the speaker to impose and explore her messy grief from a safe distance. A Great British Bake Off episode featuring a spoiled baked Alaska allows for a metaphor of anger in grief—“Enraged viewers/ blame Diana. In loss, / I too demand a Diana.” In an Anne of Green Gables episode, a pledge drive host “promises / you can keep what you love / on the air,” a promise that, in the landscape of loss, invites “abundance to be kin to comfort.” They even become a gateway for the speaker to examine death and mortality more broadly, where a show’s witches, “call all the humans mortals. Call us what we are.” These specific references place us in time not only as contemporary readers, employing a shared language from relatable cultural moments, but also paint the relationship between speaker and mother, sharing in the language of these media. This unconventional pop-culturification of grief then creates a shared language between both speaker and reader, mother and daughter. 

The poems in this collection accept death at face value. The poem “Given” proclaims, through the speaker’s liturgy: “one day we will die,” and acknowledges “Death, I never thought you weren’t coming.” There is a kind of peace in this acceptance—or perhaps, a journey to find peace in this reality—as the poem is paired with 2 Timothy 1:7 “For God has not given us a spirit of fear; but of power and love.” The speaker tries to “lighten up / a little,” yet acknowledges her default toward calculation, toward the heavy weight of the past looming and reminding her that “anything can come undone.” Loss leaves permanent wounds that “scar like a circus train.”

While home can be a shelter, it can also be the “ground that shakes.” As the poem “When My Mom Has Been Dead Two Years, The Old Bowling Alley Lot is Still Empty” reminds us, these two conditions can be synonymous, and we are the ones who must decide—even insist— on what can provide us a “certain solace.” Shelter is fragile, yet also versatile and resilient in Kiefer’s poems. The poems remind us that shelter can be found in the most unlikely of places. Nests are built in exhaust vents and “roof rafters, even if only for a season.” Even pop culture’s TV artist Bob Ross provides an affirming solace for the speaker when he “promises anyone can do this” and “[s]hows us how he’d like to live.” 

Places transform to have new life—the train station becomes a dispensary. Girls skate alongside dead factories and railroad tracks. As the speaker says in the poem “A Brief History of E.A. Robinson and the Train Station in Gardiner, Maine,” “Preservationists call this adaptive reuse.” There is recollection, reblooming, and even in the inevitability of death, an appreciation of the beautiful brevity of this life. There are glimmers of life and renewal amidst death, ending where even the burning trash is a body “compelled to beauty” and flames “take their sure chance to rebloom.”

The first poem, “In Praise of Minor,” finds beauty in the overlooked, unexpected places: in “a sadness that resolves” and the work of little-known poets that “will meet / with quiet.” Yet there is a meaning in this labor, these poems insist. Even as poets write words that are rarely read in the mainstream, and easily lost amid contemporary media overload, this labor is important and meaningful. In this poem, many things are praised despite their brevity, inconvenience, and even failure. There is a beauty and importance to living, to existing even briefly as a mortal, this collection argues. Poems and poets will continue to exist despite the quiet because poets are compelled to write poems, because even if poems are not always seen by masses, they move those that do dare to engage with them, perhaps most of all, the poet themselves. The relationships to lost places and people in Certain Shelter are brief perhaps, but that does not take away their inherent significance or impact to the speaker, and for this reason they have value. By their existence, presence, and persistence despite adversity and grief, poets and their labor–including Kiefer’s labor in these collected poems–matter and must continue to persist. Abbie Kiefer’s collection is a powerful testament to this power of poetry. Even amidst death, these poems find joy in “such generous pleasures,” reminding readers that we can grieve and grow weary while, in carrying together, also be among living, beautiful things.