Under This Roof by Theresa Monteiro
Fernwood Press, 2024
Under This Roof is a collection keenly aware of its reader. Take “In Plain English,” which discusses the speaker’s four sons who died before birth and how we as readers see that loss.
I hide them in hieroglyphs—
cellos, lemons, rivers. For you,
my grief becomes notional. For me,
these gestures are their graves.
Later, the book’s title poem explores metaphors for sorrow through the image of a woman in a flooding basement.
Hypnotized
by yellow water pooling
around her feet, she knows her
shoes will shrink—
and this, reader (you understand)
is not about the shoes.But no—not a parenthetical!
You understand—
part of the whole,
at least.
The poems of Under This Roof inform one another, gently revealing the collection’s central concern: human connection and its fragmentary nature—the fact of which the speaker both laments and lauds. This book accepts that we can never fully inhabit the experience of another person, acknowledging the loneliness inherent in that disparity. And yet it also praises our openness to understanding “part of the whole, / at least.” In that stanza, we sense the speaker’s relief. She is telling us something essential and we want to discern her meaning and our shared attempts at connection, even if imperfect, are a comfort to all of us.
The author of Under this Roof, Theresa Monteiro, is my friend. I mention this here for ethical reasons but also because the desire for communion that compels us toward friendship is the same longing that underlies this collection. To recognize shared humanity. To be recognized ourselves. This speaker sees hurt in the world—our sad hearts like “a shopping cart’s broken wheel / faltering left in whiny iambs”—and considers how, through fellowship, we might reclaim what we’ve lost or perhaps find a way to make peace with the losing.
Under This Roof is a quiet book often set in the realm of the domestic. It’s easy to dismiss as unimportant the ordinariness of daily life, but these poems, with great care, examine the quotidian: groceries that need carrying and hair that needs cutting and children who need to be assured that a universe with black holes and sarcoma clinics and assault weapons can still be a place of consolation.
In “New World Symphony,” the speaker compares the vibrations of the timpani and violin to the voice of her son, calling for her as she leaves him at school the first time.
A ripple of sound I kept
for the day, and until
now. It’s like that,
the symphony shaking
our house, above our town,
through blue atmosphere
and black space, bumping
against meteors and comets—
cosmic pinball machine.
In this way, as she often does, the poet situates the specific in the context of the larger world. Yes, the collection engages with home life, but it’s never insular or myopic. It contemplates parenting and partnership and the work of being human—sometimes with wonderment, always with generosity, and ultimately with hope, asking “When has your despair / predicted anything true?”
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Abbie Kiefer is the author of Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024) and the chapbook Brief Histories (Whittle Micro-Press, 2024). Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Image, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other places. She is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal and lives in New Hampshire.