Abbie Kiefer PRESS AND REVIEWS
Print interviews
Enjambments: An Interview Series
Talking with poets.org about grief, historical memory, and pop culture in Certain Shelter.
The First Book
Certain Shelter is included on this list of seven debuts. It's a book for anyone who has seen an old mill and felt a sorrow they couldn’t name.
Ground That Shelters: A Conversation About Loss and Survival
An interview about Certain Shelter with Maine poet and writer Jeri Theriault.
Inescapable Reminders of How Days Hurdle Forward
An interview with Nancy Reddy on how having kids gave my creative work a sense of urgency.
Why Television Was Important to a Book About Grief and Hope
An interview with Bronwen Tate on giving yourself assignments as a way to move forward with a difficult project.
Reviews
A Spare Poetry of New England
"The specific seething spareness of the New England said/unsaid lives in Abbie Kiefer’s debut collection of poetry, Certain Shelter. —Nina MacLaughlin
The Ultimate Homesickness
"Where Kiefer’s poetry derives its ultimate power is the depth of her observations, how she allows the images to speak for themselves." —Mary Ardery
"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." —Tyler Truman Julian
31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2024
"Abbie Kiefer lives in and writes about New England with voice that is hard-bitten and sardonic and yet deeply tender and lyrical. You get the feeling she would be an equally good companion at a bar, a bowling alley, a doctor’s appointment or a funeral." —David Starkey
"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." —Meghan Sterling
Ten Remarkable Small Press Titles I Read This Year
"Abbie Kiefer’s attention in Certain Shelter is so tender—it’s like when someone is looking at you, and listening, and you see their eyes soften, and you realize they are really, really listening." —Han VanderHart
What I've Been Reading: Certain Shelter
"There's engagement with decay and its inevitability, and the difficulty of revitalization, whether that might be the physical revitalization of a community or the revitalization of a life in the aftermath of loss. But there's a looking toward the future as well with a feeling that isn't exactly hope but isn't completely different from hope either." —Mike Sakasegawa
Podcasts
The Poem’s Record-Keeping of Ordinary Life
A conversation with Han VanderHart about praising the minor and the mundane and why work and productivity aren't always the same thing.
"Grief kept surprising me in strange ways"
A conversation with Mike Sakasegawa on ephemerality, poems about tv shows, and how it feels to be bad at something.
"You're never going to get it fully right—but you keep trying"
A conversation with Jason Gray on avoiding sentimentality, enacting surprise through line breaks, and rallying for a revival of E. A. Robinson's work.
"We live amid impermanence"
A recording of 10 poems for a poetry series made possible by Rice Public Library in Kittery, Maine.