THERESA MONTEIRO and ABBIE KIEFER are poets with recently published debut collections. Monteiro’s Under This Roof examines the magnitude of human experience through the details of the ordinary. Kiefer’s Certain Shelter addresses the death of a parent, a Maine mill town’s long fade, and the search for refuge in a faltering world. Both books are deeply rooted in domestic spaces. In this conversational interview, the poets and friends discuss the challenges of writing about quotidian places in surprising ways and how they use the specific and personal to comment on universal themes: loss, empathy, connection, and mystery.
Theresa Monteiro: Many poems in Certain Shelter deal with memories of towns that have changed from what they once were. You capture vivid details without romanticizing. How do you address a community or town as “place” without becoming overly nostalgic or sentimental?
Abbie Kiefer: Nostalgia is a tricky thing, isn’t it? On one hand, it’s my longing for these lost places that compelled me to write about them. So without nostalgia, maybe these poems couldn’t have existed. But leaning too heavily into wistfulness can lead, I think, to poems that feel self-indulgent—writing that isn’t generous enough with the reader. I’m glad they don’t feel overly sentimental to you, because I did worry about that. In making them, I tried to discuss the specificity of these places—the details that felt most meaningful to me—in a way that could also be meaningful to people with no connection to the region I was writing about. And I worked to be a bit spare with my descriptions, a little bit restrained, so readers had the space to arrive at their own conclusions.
Here’s one example: the book includes a poem about a demolished candlepin bowling alley. Maybe the reader didn’t candlepin bowl as a kid (although I think everyone should come to New England and try it) but they probably understand the feeling of a childhood afternoon guiltlessly spent on an activity of no consequence. They probably remember thinking, as a kid, that the places of childhood would always just exist. Then one day, oof, they don’t.
Moving from the specific to the universal is one of the things you do most beautifully in your work, particularly in Under This Roof. I’m thinking about poems like “The Stones Will Cry Out,” which begins in a home, with one kid solving math proofs at the table and another pounding piano keys and ends, zoomed way out, on a plane that “flies near to earth, / bringing a lover to her love.” Can you talk a little bit about this technique—guiding the reader’s focus from the narrow to the broad?
I tried to discuss the specificity of these places—the details that felt most meaningful to me—in a way that could also be meaningful to people with no connection to the region I was writing about.”
TM: When I wrote this poem I was reading a lot of haiku. What struck me about these poems was how they could be so concrete, referencing specific objects in nature, but still evoke the presence of people and their emotions. So, I started thinking and writing a lot about how to be in a space with my senses instead of my feelings. That is, I wanted to focus on the sensory perceptions of a place like “home” and how the environment affected me physically before I jumped to any analysis of the emotional impact of that space.
I think it can be easy to begin a poem with emotions or psychological insights, but when we skip over the physical and concrete perceptions of place, we can deny the reader their experience. I suppose this is how I move from narrow to broad; it happens when I restrict myself to a minute, even haiku-like observation, and allow that “noticing” to spread.
This is, of course, only one of many different inroads we could take into the making of a poem. Sometimes that presence of the “I” and what the “I” is experiencing needs to be backed away from.
The people in your poems are integral to the rendering of place, whether that is a community or a domestic space. Did you have trouble balancing both the “I” of the poems and the other figures? Did you ever find you had to make the “I” voice more prominent or less prominent?
AK: I think about this all the time—how much the speaker should be part of a poem. In Certain Shelter, much of which addresses personal grief and how my personhood has been shaped by where I grew up, the speaker is often necessarily prominent. It’s mostly a first-person book, and I think that was the right choice for this collection. But, as your question acknowledges, letting the “I” be part of the poem doesn’t mean that the speaker must be the poem’s focus.
I tried to balance poems about the speaker’s direct experience with poems that included the speaker but also told the stories of others because this is a book, in part, about our shared humanity. Some readers might find first-person poetry indulgent—the product of a self-concerned writer. But I find that the use of “I” makes a poem feel particular. It primes me, as a reader, to be more empathetic. As a poet, I wanted to take advantage of the openness that first-person writing fosters.
Another reason the “I” is prevalent in my work: I often set my poems in the home and an intimate setting calls for the use of an intimate voice—at least most of the time.
An interest in the domestic is something you and I share as writers. I’d love to hear more about how you approach making poems about home life. Contending with the quotidian in surprising ways can be challenging but you’re so good at it. How do you do it?
TM: I would like to claim some unique element of craft, but I think a large part of my treatment of domestic spaces comes from how I was raised. My parents always impressed upon me that daily life was the most of life. Some philosophies seem to suggest that the ordinary is what we need to escape to find our purpose or reason for existing. There is, of course, beauty and benefit from hiking to the top of a mountain or spending time on a retreat. But for the most part, if we are going to find life’s meaning, our reason for existing, it will be among the pots and pans, the traffic jams, in conversations with friends, and conflicts with difficult people. When I sit down to write a poem and discover that it needs to include the sound of the vacuum or cracks in a sidewalk, it’s because I’m looking for meaning there. I don’t want to see these details as ornamental to the poem but as an observation that could lead to a discovery. My poetry teacher used to impress upon his students the power of a poem in which the reader can tell that the poet surprised herself. That discovery was made in the process of making the poem. When I contemplate the domestic space with the hope that I discover something hidden in the ordinary, I am often pleasantly surprised. We can become so accustomed to home that we don’t see it. I’m grateful to poets who have helped me look at home from a new perspective—to see all of its secrets.
…if we are going to find life’s meaning, our reason for existing, it will be among the pots and pans, the traffic jams, in conversations with friends, and conflicts with difficult people.”
You also have this element of surprise in your poetry. There are moments in your work where the reader is startled by a revelation that seems to come from a moment of daily quietness. The end of your poem “Given” moves so quickly from a discussion of the domestic burdens taken on by a family in grief to the arresting last sentence, “Death, I never thought / you weren’t coming.” As you wrote these poems about personal grief and community loss, were you surprised by how much newness you saw in familiar places?
AK: Yes, surprised for sure—and in a way that I found difficult, at least at first. Grief can feel like a low hum or a fog—always there, always making you aware of its presence, but in a way that doesn’t require you to examine it. I knew, that if I wanted to write meaningfully about loss, I’d have to think closely about its distinctive shape. What particular qualities made a shuttered mill so affecting to me? Why did watching M*A*S*H make me feel my mom’s absence more keenly? When I could answer questions like these with specificity, that’s when surprise arrived. As you mentioned earlier, it’s easy to miss the meaning in what becomes common to us. As poets, if we care about craft, we have to push past that. In the case of these poems, being surprised by familiar places meant also being unsettled by them. Sometimes, that was the cost of writing these poems. If I was going to write well about grief, I was going to first have to sit with grief’s discomfort.
I love what you said earlier—when we skip over the physical and concrete perceptions of place, we can deny the reader the full experience of the work. I never articulated it as well as you did, but I can see that philosophy within my book. The bowling poem I mentioned earlier is called “When My Mom Has Been Dead Eight Months, They Tear Down Lucky Candlepin,” and it is very much about loss. But that loss is only mentioned once, in the title itself. The rest of the poem describes the bowling alley of the speaker’s childhood: the pale lanes, the flickering Pac-Man machine, the hazed balls that just keep returning, like magic. None of my memories of this place felt remarkable until I started thinking about it as a metaphor for the inevitability of bereavement, at which point the descriptions of the space became central to the poem’s meaning.
Grief can feel like a low hum or a fog—always there, always making you aware of its presence, but in a way that doesn’t require you to examine it.”
Thinking about surprise has made me also think about its companion: mystery. In your book’s title poem, “Under This Roof,” you describe a woman standing in a flooding basement, watching a plastic wreath float past while realizing her shoes will shrink. You write that “this, reader (you understand) / is not about the shoes. // But no—not a parenthetical! / You understand— / part of the whole, / at least.” You’re praising the reader’s willingness to empathize, to understand in part—but you’re also recognizing that some facets of human experience—our own and others’—will always remain a mystery. The speaker of the poem seems at peace with that limitation. How does mystery influence your work? How do you address it among concrete perceptions of place?
TM: I think my relationship with mystery, or my fascination with it, is exactly what draws me to poetry. I know and love many scientific people. Without their drive to investigate the mysteries of the universe, where would we be? We likely wouldn’t have vaccines or airplanes. For me, though, I don’t feel the same attraction to rapidly uncovering the secrets of this life—I like living with them for a while. I love how poems can present a mystery, whether it’s about the complexities of human relationships or the workings of memory, and then allow the reader to walk away from the poem still contemplating the questions. I don’t go to poems for hard and fast answers, I want poems to give me more questions to think about. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want answers, I just want to live in the unknowing for a while; or, maybe, I do want to live in it for a lifetime.
Place is central to this question because the more we attend to the places we are in, the more we observe and listen and watch the movements in these spaces, the more questions we have about life. The domestic space is always churning up mystery for me. I think the poem, “In the Beginning” illustrates this most clearly. Most of the poem is a careful observation of the beginnings of life from a biological perspective. It’s incredible that science can tell us how cells can replicate, and how chromosomes migrate and align differently depending on whether they are creating diploid or haploid cells. How amazing! But at the end of the poem, a young boy eating cereal asks, “Why don’t turtles love their babies?” This is the mystery I want to contemplate and live with. How can we understand so much about biology but so much less about love?
AK: Oh, I love that answer. Cheers to the churning up of mystery and to the poems that help us appreciate it.
Theresa Monteiro lives in New Hampshire with her husband and children and holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire. Her first book of poems, Under This Roof, was published by Fernwood Press in 2024. Her poems appear in various magazines and journals including The American Journal of Poetry, On the Seawall, River Heron Review, Cutleaf, The Banyan Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Poetry South. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Abbie Kiefer is the author of Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024) and the chapbook Brief Histories (Whittle, 2024). Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other places. She lives in New Hampshire. Find her online at abbiekieferpoet.com.
