Spoke - Paperback

Poetry. Spoke is a dirge, a love song, and a remixed retrospection. In Arden Levine's debut full-length collection, a woman cycles - literally and metaphorically - across decades of evolving city landscapes, the strange viaducts of cognition and memory, and the wandering geographies of the body. A catalog of childhood hazards and an elegy for a father lost young give way to a requiem for Generation X culture and a compassionate critique of language itself. Against the traffic of grief, Levine's poems offer a meditation on what rips jaggedly and what slices cleanly, navigating even the darkest turns with arch wit while pressing play.

Says Sandra Beasley, "To fathom healing, we must first know the wound. In her moving collection, Arden Levine unpacks the wounds, offering attention that is by equal measures tender and forensic. Spoke creates a taxonomy of grief that is as surprising as it is capacious, locating elegy in handwritten letters, in bicycles, in music, and even in cake. These aren't just poems-they're access points to a complex personal chronicle and, more importantly, they are invitations to dialogue. Spoke offers beautiful revolutions of language and, within each turn, a revelation."

Patricia Spears Jones adds, "What do bicycles and parking lots, pies and funeral homes, Joni Mitchell and Dolly Parton all have in common? They are figures in the emotionally powerful poems of Spoke by Arden Levine. This collection whispers, shouts, and sings in sorrow, rage, and tortured memory. Yes, sings: In their terse and truthful way, these poems reveal the living music of father/daughter relationships, guilt, grief, and deep, abiding love. Spoke shifts forms, breaks genres, and quotes pop tunes to tease out, tear up, and temper a woman's emotional journey."