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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.