Certain Shelter

Abbie Kiefer

Abbie Kiefer’s debut collection is a clear-eyed portrait of an aging mill town and a larger reflection on memory, making, and the significance of home. What sources of solace and stability remain amid the ruins of industry, after the death of a parent, while raising children in an uncertain time alongside the ghosts of the past? How do we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of change and protect what remains? A transcendent exploration of breakdown and renewal, of vulnerability and endurance, of personal and communal responses to loss, this book takes up the question of how to find shelter and make one’s way in an altered world. 

“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

“Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer is an exquisite collection that weaves together personal loss and the enduring spirit of a place and people grappling with ruin. These poems praise in the aftermath. They praise in the minor key. And the effect is dazzling. Kiefer is an immense lyrical storyteller and philosopher. Mother-loss parallels both a mill town’s and a poet daughter’s desire for wholeness in what crumbles—bodies, worlds. Here is a saltbox crafted with care, a shelter of pinewood, and a speaker who, when everything else falls away, will hold even ‘empty space.’ Built with such spare, deft architecture, these poems brim with tenderness, irony, and heart.”

—Jennifer Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal and Landscape with Headless Mama

“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

“In this collection, Abbie Kiefer has made for us a kind of shelter without shelter, a kind of certainty without certainty. During and after the loss of a parent and the loss of a hometown, and through the pleasures and sadnesses of contemporary life, these well-crafted poems offer all kinds of ways of standing in and out of the rain. ‘Because it is solace to say it plainly,’ Kiefer writes. These poems are a love letter to so many things, including parts of Maine that have been going away for decades now. ‘Ground that shakes,’ she writes, ‘can also shelter.’”

—Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, author of Deke Dangle Dive

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Media & Mentions

Electric Literature reading list by Abbie Kiefer: “8 Poetry Collections with a Compelling Sense of Place” (October 2024)

“Like my speaker, I think often about the places we belong to or from which we are exiled—by choice or otherwise. That fascination emerges often in my writing but also in my reading. I keep reaching for books that give keen attention to a particular geography and the complexities of connection between a place and its people.”

Good Creatures interview with Nancy Reddy in her Write More, Be Less Careful newsletter (October 2024)

Boston Globe write-up by Nina MacLaughlin, New England Literary News roundup “Poems of shelter, unexpected verse, and the Word festival” (October 2024)

“Even the pop-cultural references—‘The Wonder Years,’ ‘M*A*S*H,’ ‘The Great British Bake Off,’ ‘Bewitched’—hold an elegiac atmosphere. And Kiefer writes, too, of the downfall of a mill town, the closing of the factory, the jobs lost, the people gone, the homes left. Home, its presence and its lack, runs through the collection, and there’s a powerful matter-of-factness to Kiefer’s truths … ”

Philly Poetry Chapbook Review new poetry titles roundup (October 2024)

Academy of American Poets (Poets.org) “enjambments” interview (October 2024)

“When my grief was thickest after I lost my mom, I had trouble sleeping, and so I’d put on comfort TV in the dark early hours—Bob Ross whispering to me about his clouds and his trees. That’s how pop culture first found its way into my book. But writing about television—something often seen as a time-waster—became a way for me to think about idleness and productivity, two themes the book addresses.”

Essay in Cleaver magazine by Abbie Kiefer, “The Generous Act of Publishing Drafts” (October 2024)

“In rewriting an already-public poem, you admit which parts of your work you found wanting or that you maybe just outgrew. It’s vulnerable and brave to hold your poems with such open hands, allowing observers into your process and accepting that your current creative choices might feel wrong in the future.”

Review in The Shore by Tyler Truman Julian (October 2024)

“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 Shelter 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.”

Write or Die’s roundup “23 Books We Can’t Wait to Read: October 2024” (September 2024)

Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram feature on the poem “In Praise of Minor” (September 2024)

Poems from Here (Maine Public Radio) feature on the poem “In Praise of Minor” (April 2024)

Review in MER: “Contending with Ghosts: The Tapestry of Place and Loss in Abbie Kiefer’s Certain Shelter” by Meghan Sterling (July 2024)

“Like Kiefer, I am a middle-aged mother with aging parents. Like Kiefer, I want poems to help me bridge my losses—and these poems do. These poems hit hard, but as much out of gentleness as ferocity. Like torn leaves tossed into the Kennebec River, these poems tender their touch—the losses they render rise as blossoms, as ghosts, as ashes from fire. I was left breathless.

… How do we straddle the line between having and losing? How do we embrace life as we experience loss? How do we pay tribute to periods, places, and people who are gone? Certain Shelter is an exquisite poetry collection that explores love and joy when all is uncertain.”

Also check out Abbie’s digital micro-chapbook, Brief Histories (published by Whittle Micro-Press in March 2024), where several of the poems in this collection previously appeared.