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."
Review :
Spoke creates a tender and forensic taxonomy as surprising as it is capacious, locating moments of elegy in handwritten letters, in bicycles, 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
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
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.
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
