When reading Danika Stegeman’s Ablation, it might be useful to reconsider your understanding of glaciers. Like the main cultural references to glaciers is their going-away-ness. Which, in turn, speaks to their necessity. As hyperobjects. A glacier like an ocean that extends over vast areas. For Stegeman, the glacier isn’t operating as precursor to the Anthropocene. The glacier is a reality of nature. Like in Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s ‣, when the glacier by its existence (and, in her case, its proximity) explains something implicit to her perspective. This physical reality that speaks to a glacier’s seeming immovability, though it’s actually not immovable, this is what the glacier is for Stegeman, especially in the title poem, “Ablation.” Meaning, the glacier leaves the impression of stagnancy; it’s literally frozen in time. And this reality makes it an especially sharp analogy for grief. For instance, think of the pressures a glacier would use to shape the land, and think, then, of how the loss of your mother will exist as a fact shaping your self. And, like a glacier, that shaping can feel immovable interminable.
It might appear, then, that Stegeman’s book operates as an elegy for her mother. And to the degree that her mother’s death stands as the book’s occasion, it exhibits its debt to elegy’s conventions. But to what degree does dying supplant Stegeman’s view of her mother’s life? A question like this is central to the book, because, read from beginning to end, the book dwells in intense sentiment for what a mother can represent at the moment of death. There is a broader truth, however, to the mother’s life, and the shapes that life imposed onto the poet. Once the book moves past the poet’s shock, it observes a family life that suffered from extreme abuse and sexual assault. How far did the mother’s traumatic life extend into the poet’s? What would the be the register of weight and counterweight that might be understood in a glacier’s frozen waters? Stegeman’s mother immediately after death appears as the radical caretaker, a nostalgic crucible whose physical presence is returned to again and again in the first third of the book.
The mother who appears at the opening exists, however, in an abstracted space that is beyond language—a point the poet speaks to explicitly and implicitly. This part of the book, however, operating in brief lyric stanzas, isolated on each page, it feels more gestural than felt. Which isn’t a statement about the poet’s grief, more about the poetic complexity of that grief. Not until the book shifts to the sad realities of her mother’s life do I find myself involved in questions of personhood, feminist realities, and the long reach of personal trauma. The second half of the book is shaped around these additional dimensions, especially as they relate the life as a woman. And they’re further complicated when considering how the life of a mother influences the life of her daughter. Stegeman’s mother lived a broken and amplified and unstable life, and it established dense relationships with her children.
The book’s achievement revolves around grief. In particular, how it expresses grief as a chronological experience of her mother’s death. The poems accept what happened, then move to accepting who her mother was to her, and finally the array of memories and objects and associations with family that will operate like glacial pressures experienced via the mundane. Stegeman relates has included photographs of collage work and artifacts that capture the tragic immediacy surrounding the death. There are lists she’s written on a used envelope. A scrap from her mother’s hospital wristband. It’s strange to me how distant I feel from the evident sentiment. There is a sequence to grief. Which is generally recognized. But complicating these “stages of grief” with the poetic sequence affords Stegeman a range of perspective. Like the poet has extended the mechanics of the elegy to understand who the loved one was more completely.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.