About Arden Levine
Arden Levine is the author of the chapbook Ladies’ Abecedary (Harbor Editions). A finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series, she has published in Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere, and her work has been featured by the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Society of America. Arden lives in New York City and works in urban housing policy and community development.
Praise for SPOKE
Spoke creates a tender and forensic taxonomy as surprising as it iscapacious, locating moments of elegy in handwritten letters, in music, even in cake. The author’s hidden weapon is her wry precision: 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.– Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode
Part eulogy, part requiem, part inventory, Levine’s poems wheel across the precarious terrain of heredity and legacy with incisive candor, humor, and concern. Spoke, like its title, is piercing and telling, a forward motion through the past to a place where “love is a good word”: elusive and crucial as truth. “We are poor historians” Levine writes, yet with these poems she has created a truly rich historical document.– Tina Cane, author of Year of the Murder Hornet
The voice in Spoke is a savvy speaker’s riff on what hard-won wisdom looks like: raw and well-read, astute and lacerated, compassionate and sardonic, with a keen edge of laugh-out-loud sophistication. Round and round, throughout, the bicycle is both “weapon and witness… bystander and accomplice in this story.” Levine is fully in control of the language she has learned to wield against the common but wily forces that beset us all. – Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., author of Salient
A poet known for her craft as well as art, Levine has created a collection that 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. What a ride.
Join her.– Patricia Spears Jones, author of The Beloved Community
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