As I read Danika Stegeman’s second poetry collection Ablation (11:11), I couldn’t get Ari Aster’s Hereditary out of my mind. The film, which renders the sprawling elongation of complicated grief and a daughter’s great fear of becoming her mother, especially in motherhood, is pure emotional horror. Its most graphic moments—a daughter’s severed head, a husband aflame—to my surprise elicits no big emotional response from me for their gore alone. Instead, its true horror is the kind we all experience to some degree—the horror of the interpersonal dynamics of family, of childhood wounds, of matrilineal inheritance, of motherhood.
Stegeman parses those same horrors in Ablation as she deals with the unexpected loss of her mother while pregnant with her daughter in the first few months of the pandemic. But unlike the more pessimistic Hereditary, Ablation buzzes with love and generosity. Where Hereditary reinforces the inescapability of generational trauma, Ablation shows a way out.
I spoke with Stegeman about this sprawling hybrid collection, beginnings and endings, rendering the uncontainable, and the nature of horror in art and in life.
Olivia Muenz (OM): Ablation is partly about the loss of your mother, who died in July 2020 from a pulmonary embolism caused by heart problems that couldn’t be treated by a cardiac ablation. How did you arrive at “ablation” as not only the title, but also the central force of the book?
Danika Stegeman (DS): Ablation started as the title sequence, “Ablation.” I started drafting that sequence in the fall of 2017, when my mom shared the news that she needed an ablation to repair her lifelong heart defect. That news happened to arrive around the same time I learned that I was pregnant with my daughter. The word “ablation” was new to me, and I looked up the meaning. I was moved by its various meanings, which were analogous to one another but discrete: the surgical removal of body tissue, the process of evaporation of ice from a glacier, and the shedding of portions of a spacecraft as it passes through the atmosphere. All of these are processes of taking away. I began to write the title sequence based on that idea. My childhood and my relationship with my mom were complex. I inherently understood from somewhere deep within me that I needed to untangle and shed some of those complexities before becoming a mother. “Ablation” began as a meditation on a kind of becoming that involves birth. I was about three-quarters of the way through it when my mom died, unexpectedly, and it became a meditation on a kind of becoming that involves death.
For me, both sorts of becoming required a taking away or leaving behind and were experienced in a liminal space between being one sort of thing/person and another. I intended for the title sequence to shed and accumulate the way a glacier does. And I hope the rest of the book mimics that glacial process, but from alternate positions. The book has multiple forms, multiple dimensions, multiple points of perspective, like the definition of “ablation” that inspired it.
OM: Can you talk about how the pandemic shaped this book?
DS: I originally envisioned the book as consisting only of the title sequence. The pandemic changed that. The title sequence is tightly wrought, bound in a precise form (the mirror or butterfly cinquain). It’s a space of compression, like a cluster of diamonds being formed under tremendous pressure. The rest of the poems spill over their edges. They sprawl. They sprawl because grief poured out of me; it flooded my previously neat and closed form. The book is what I am and I am what the book is.
I think part of Ablation’s sprawl has to do with grief, but I also think it has to do with time. Do you remember the way time seemed to spread out and slow down during the pandemic? The ways we had previously marked time, had cut it apart into tiny bits and tossed it away, were disrupted. I remember my husband at the time saying to wait just one more half hour to give our daughter her snack because it was like the event of the afternoon. After the snack was over, there was a seemingly endless expanse of time before dinner. Before Ablation, I struggled to write poems that were longer than a page. Now I can’t seem to avoid extending a poem as far as possible, to the point that it’s book-length, to the point that it’s maybe endless. The pandemic gave me time, and it gave me time to consider its shape and flow, as well as the shape and flow of my grief.
OM: If I had to choose, I’d say Ablation is ultimately an exploration of inherited trauma that’s opened by the loss of your mother. Mother-daughter relationships are so specific, complicated, and untranslatable. I kept thinking of Ari Aster’s Hereditary as I was reading, which uses horror to explore the same thing. Do you think there are any elements of horror at play in Ablation?
DS: I’m so interested in that verb you use in the first sentence: opened. The loss was like opening a door. Or several doors. Countless doors. I can’t watch Hereditary, lol. One of my brothers watches horror movies for me and tells me which ones I can handle and which ones I probably better skip. I feel them in my body. They’ll take up residence for years sometimes. Hereditary was emphatically deemed one of the horror movies I should skip. I trust my brother when he tells me this. So I can’t speak directly to that film. But I do think there are elements of horror at play in Ablation. When I talked about the book with Joe Bielecki on his podcast, Writing the Rapids, I think he called it a squishy kind of horror. It exposes vulnerabilities, soft insides. Joe admitted to it causing him unease and discomfort in a way that a harder, more aggressive kind of horror does not. I think that’s partly because we all carry the kinds of wounds that Ablation reveals, but we’re taught to cover them. It’s easier to look at a wound that’s nightmarish and distorted than one that feels close to the skin, one that might open in you.
I think an element of horror is to expose wounds, to examine them. I find myself compelled to do that for some reason. Even in Pilot (Spork Press, 2020), when I was trying to mask myself in the words of the episode transcripts for Lost that I used to compose the poems, I’m doing that. The violence seeps through. I’d never considered myself a horror writer, but I can’t seem to avoid letting the violence in/out. One of my constant obsessions as a writer is examining insides and outsides and where they converge. And there’s a sort of horror in that. Is there a site of convergence that isn’t violent? Where something isn’t destroyed so that something else can be created? Is that horror? Does it only seem that way because of the way I’m looking at it?
OM: I love how uncontainable and unnameable Ablation is. Part ecopoetry, part crip poetics, there’s so much conflation between self and language, language and body, body and earth, “you” and “I”—and yet it contradicts itself too: “As you / form a sense of / self, you recognize that / you’re separate form everything. You / mirror / me, and / I mirror you. Our lungs feel the / trees. We share symmetry; / it reminds us we’re real.” What moved you toward this nebulousness?
DS: I feel nebulous sometimes. Do you feel nebulous sometimes? We are uncertain and moving and forming and reforming. Everything is unknowable and moving and forming and reforming. A sort of expansion happened in me and my thinking after my mom died. Her existence was part of my way of being in the world; in several ways my being was a response to her presence in it. All of that fell away after she died. There were so many things I didn’t need to be anymore. I was un-defined. Poetry and language are my ways of exploring where I find myself. The poems change when I change; I change when the poems change. Do you like to get lost in your own sentences? To make them into labyrinths? To turn them inside out and then stare into the gap that yawns between them? Do you ever want to fall inside?
Of course all of this is also what I talked about above: an interest in insides and outsides, where one thing begins and another ends, and what happens in the space and time and boundary that separates those things. We consist of the same stuff, are linked, but we are separate. Once our body was our mother’s body. But even then, it wasn’t. Nebulousness is pre-birth, it’s immanence. It’s what’s always moving me.
OM: I’m struck by the clunk of punctuation. Every sentence is complete. Not a line hangs. It feels so definite, heavy, and final. And yet so at odds with the wisps of memory that you can’t quite hang on to, and the indefinability of the project. Can you talk about how punctuation emerged as you wrote?
DS: I was very interested in the sentence while writing Ablation. What happens to a sentence when it’s forced into syllabics, highly enjambed–does it become a needle pulling itself through the eye of a needle? What happens to a sentence when it stands alone, when you give it space, when you stitch it to other sentences not by logic or line breaks but by threading one common word through the poem? What happens when you spool a sentence around very long lines? What happens when you break it into phrases? What happens when you make it carry a paragraph? What happens when you ask it to be a vessel, when you ask it to hold something you can no longer bear to hold?
I’m not sure people love it when I say stuff like this, but the punctuation emerged just as you describe: as I wrote it. Each sentence took the shape it needed. If it’s intentional, it’s inextricable from my poetic ear and gut and intuition, which I’ve developed across time. I don’t know how it works for others, but so much of the way I choose to pace lines, shape sound, punctuate, happens automatically. It’s like muscle memory. I’ve pulled apart and shaped words so many times that it’s a muscle. I don’t think about it that hard while I’m doing it. It just comes out. In retrospect, the completeness and finality you’re describing in the punctuation is probably a
reaction to the indefinable quality of memory and grief. It’s a way to try to cope with that. I’m trying to be certain, authoritative, decisive, in the face of what is not and never will be. But I have to put this down here. I’m insisting on it. I am relentless, after all.
OM: I’m really interested in the form of Ablation. It’s a hybrid text, but definitely leans poetic. There are cinquains, couplets, prose poems, a monostich. There’s ephemera—scans of photographs, lists, notes, threads. It’s broken into sections. The literal shape of the book is large, horizontal, and nearly square-shaped, which gives the pages lots of room that you sometimes fill up, sometimes leave gaping. How do you see this breadth working?
DS: The breadth is a consequence of some of what we’re talking about in the question above: my memories, experiences, grief, and my mom felt undefinable and unknowable in a lot of ways. Grief is illegible. A person is illegible. Our relationships are illegible. Because they are expansive but also ephemeral. I was trying, as fully as possible, to hold as much as I could of that experience in the book. It needed to gape sometimes and sometimes it needed to be crowded. Words weren’t enough so I needed images. Images weren’t enough so some of them had to be haunted. Haunting wasn’t enough, couldn’t be all that was there, so I needed to pull needles and thread through the text, to try to pin down what would never move again. The book is a kind of
struggle between my trying to order and make sense of my life and my mom’s life and what brought me to the present and my trying to just let it be what it is. Or, rather, the material’s insistence on me just letting it be what it is, which is, still, undefinable.
OM: How has Ablation served as a launching point for what you’re working on now?
DS: As I said earlier, Ablation opened a lot of doors. I sometimes think about it like a blockage I needed to clear so my work could flow more freely. Like an antidote to a blood clot, I suppose. The antidote my mom did not get. I’ve basically written two books since Ablation. The first one, The Book of Matthew, was started alongside Ablation. I consider it the shadow Ablation casts, because it deals with the aftermath, and it’s also kind of magical. Ablation reckons with the past and Matthew begins to try to dream a future. It takes on a wide variety of forms the way that Ablation does and some of the poems are long or certain ideas and forms are extended across the book: the epistle, for example. It’s also fun. I needed to write something fun while I was writing the poems in Ablation because they were such heavy things to put down.
I’ve just finished the first draft of the book that follows The Book of Matthew, which I’m calling Wheel of Fortune. Probably these three books are a sort of trilogy. Wheel of Fortune is like the embracing of a new form. The sprawling that began in Ablation mutates into something wholly new. The Wheel contains no sentences; it attempts to flow like time, it is a book-length work with no breaks. When I first started writing the title sequence “Ablation” I wanted to write a poem that didn’t have an order. I wanted to be able to pull any page and swap it out and put it in a new place, and it would still flow and make sense. But then I spent so much time sequencing “Ablation” that I understood it wasn’t meant to operate in that way. I think I finally get there in Wheel of Fortune. Any piece of it is essentially moveable to any other piece without disrupting the flow of the whole. It feels like the fully evolved entity that began with Ablation, like the full revolution of a wheel, like I find myself back where I began but in an entirely new place.
