Certain Shelter: Audiobook

“This is the book of poems I needed to read this year, the year my own mother died. And this is the book I needed to read this summer, when the river is high and the water and words come rushing and cold. Abbie Kiefer’s poems brim with a practical tenderness. She wields a Yankee sensibility with language—every word perfectly chosen, every line a clean break. In this book, factories close down and people sew their own sutures. The garden blooms another season. Another year approaches and we fret. But there is something beautiful waiting in the soil, too. Read this book if you are a daughter or a son or a parent or if you are someone who has lost something, because this book will help you find something. There’s something for you on every page.” —Christina Olson, author of The Anxiety Workbook

“Abbie Kiefer’s Certain Shelter is a book about generations of women, about childhood landscape, about loss. Kiefer looks forward and back into the body and landscape of her mother, who has died of cancer. She writes, ‘We never stop wanting parents. Wanting home.’ Kiefer rises far above sentimentality with a strong focus on craft, on objects, and on centering the reader in time and space through surprising references to pop culture (like Hot Lips Houlihan, Bob Ross, and Jeopardy!) that show the beauty and absurdity of losing a parent who is a collection of memories and scaffolding. Kiefer tells us, ‘Oh, I’m tender / toward relics.’ Indeed, here are the relics of childhood, threaded through the mother and into the woman who is now a mother, in the setting of small-town Maine, which reflects the internal crumbling and displacement in its economic decline and later revitalizations. ‘Anything, anything can come undone,’ writes Kiefer. Through her humor, her expert lines, and her transformative images, though, anyone who has lost a parent might learn to ‘take their sure chance to rebloom.’” —Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot