Danika LeMay

[Other Books] Ablation // Danika Stegeman LeMay

+++

Previously on Danika Stegeman LeMay: The Psycho Holosuite Years:

  • A ‘Midsommar’ piece for film dada with lines like: ‘It’s winter in my heart. Hey baby. How you feeling?’ or ‘Drop the curtains. The day is unspeakable.’
  • Her hybrid novel PILOT deconstructed but not really [the process for the De-con-struc series is still finding its feet i.e. both tone and style seem to be different with each piece].

Now, she’s swooping in with another hybrid-ish book of poems called ABLATION, a word that has been giving me a lot of trouble as, no matter how many times I look it up and stare at the letters, it just won’t stick in my brain. I heard it in ‘Star Trek’ once – ablative shielding on the ship – but I didn’t really know what that meant, only that the Borg couldn’t seem to penetrate it.

For the Chinese translation of the novel title, I went with ‘person who is losing skin.’ But I think ablation might mean limbs, not skin.

Okay, just checked for the seventeenth time and it’s the removal of body tissue.

Does that mean medical removal? Or a natural occurrence?

I’m gonna stick with the translation I’ve already got cos I don’t know what body tissue is in Chinese and skin sounds more poetic e.g. shed skin and there’s new skin underneath.

What’s ABLATION about?

Here’s the synopsis:

‘Ablation is an elegy to Stegeman LeMay’s mom, who died in 2020, and, simultaneously, a love letter to Stegeman LeMay’s young daughter. The book was written in the liminal spaces opened by birth, death, and trauma. It contains poems, hybrid text, images as windows and thread as a form of healing. The book’s materials coalesce and surface, waves washing along the thresholds of control and chaos, form and formlessness. These thresholds become points of divergence, where what’s essential is carried forward, where all else is transformed and unshored.’

I’ll be honest, I was a bit wary about writing something about this as it’s clearly quite personal for Danika and my style can sometimes be a bit abrasive [ablative?].

Not intentionally, it just ends up like that somehow.

But then, there are some questions in the liminal space between my brain and all the miscellaneous stuff, mostly around methodology and subject-matter permission, so I’m just gonna plough ahead and ask them [to myself] and then probably do a spec too.

Or I’ll do the spec first.

Continue reading →

[De-Con-Struc] Pilot // Danika Stegeman LeMay

~~~

Title: PILOT

Author: Danika Stegeman LeMay

Premise: I/YOU/WE crash land on an island, fall into chaos, cling onto love, pine for escape, come to terms with YOUR/MY/OUR predicament, sail through occasional references to the TV show LOST.

Publisher: Spork Press

~~~

A book surrounded by LOST, using it but not about it.

Suffocating it?

Bleaching out the plot, beautifying the remainder?

Maybe.

Here’s the second page, after the plane crash, before the drama begins:

+

+

You’re being worthless.

I’m staring at bodies.

Does that change anything?

Continue reading →

Midsommar // Danika Stegeman LeMay

+++

i.

I forget your name is cut from mine. You’re not as I remember you.

The cell is the fabric of the macrocosm. Cords couple the living and the dead. 

Bowing draws the notes taut. The snow falls and falls. Vomit encrusts their duct taped lips. Buckle and keen into their glassed eyes. The throat enters as violins to limn you like a portal. This is the end I asked for. 

It’s winter in my heart. Hey baby. How you feeling? Disengagement. Frames into other worlds speaking through mirrors. Who’s outside. The statement is a question. 

Birds dismantle a surfacing whale. We peer from its ribcage. Does a community of mutual indifference constitute a community? Your disembodied voice deflects, consumes the walls. 

Future I feel in my body. I try to give it words but my grief defies shape. The smoke grows inside you. The taste of earth on your tongue spreading. 

Your eyes are green. Mine are brown. Shovel of nesting, shovel of dirt.

ii.

We’ll arrive on the day of your birth. Gentleness is enough to coax a sob you won’t release. I translate your tongue without foreknowledge. The timing of my healing offsets a continuum of field. Everybody lay down. Taper the grass with your fingers. Fall through. 

It’s almost your birthday. Your hair is gilt. We were born on the same day. I lose myself in the embrace. 

Through a corona that doubles as a gate. Doubles as a frame. Doubles as a portal. Doubles as a crown. 

Fear blocks grief from exiting your body. Put it under your pillow and dream about its power. 

I braid your hair in a complex system of breathwork. This is the temple. This is the bear. This is the storyline of desire. June is the zenith. You’ll never be brighter. 

Drop the curtains. The day is unspeakable. 

Continue reading →