Pilot

by Danika Stegeman

Pilot is a delight to read. A new kind of erasure, the book pulls its raw materials from the popular TV series LOST, speaking from a common source through borrowed tongues. Like the Odyssey's Penelope, LeMay weaves a tapestry within carefully set boundaries, only to unravel what's been wrought and repeat, repeat, repeat.

The landscape of the book is constructed at the crux of lyric and the image and invites the reader in. It looks like a jungle that's caught fire. Amid flames, the limits of confession and the confines of agency come into question. The voice is intimate; the gaze is violent.

Ultimately, Pilot is a book about recovery and human connection. How do we save one another in a nearly consumed, increasingly isolated world?

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published April 24, 2020

About the author

Danika Stegeman's second book, Ablation, is available from 11:11 Press November 1st, 2023. Her book Pilot (2020) was published by Spork Press. She’s a 2023 recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and recently spent a 2-week residency in Marathon, TX outside Big Bend National Park. Her video poem, “Then Betelgeuse Reappears” was an official selection for the 2021 Midwest Video Poetry Festival. Stegeman received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University where she was awarded the Heritage Fellowship. Her website is www.danikastegeman.com.

Reviews

[Kaia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Remember / how we loved some strangers for awhile / because we could relate with the idea of being lost / but mostly because we could relate with the desire / to be rescued."

-from "Interlude: Setting"

[Amanda Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been waiting to read this book since I was a baby librarian and it was truly worth the wait. Given the constraints, the poems felt free, as if falling from the sky.

[Vincent Perrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review Forthcoming @ https://heavyfeatherreview.org/

[Hannah VanderHart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice Notley wrote of Stein that “she was all voice,” and that is my experience reading these delicately fierce, dialogue-borne poems by Danika Stegeman LeMay. What a beautiful book!

[Isaac Pickell · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a trancelike quality to reading Pilot, within its rhythm of half-recollected source material, which ferries you out to sea until you forget which way is home. Only then, shaken awake by some gum in the gears of this partially programmatic project, do you realize you’ve ran ashore, and you’re reminded “we were made of time.” These poems flow through you, or “scream soft / like an artery,”

In short, this isn’t a book to read just once: Lemay can find the philosophy and the heart of anything, and inside Pilot you find more of each with every pass.

[Haley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never seen _Lost_; I think this book is exquisite.