Arden Levine
Arden Levine's poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Sycamore Review, and Sixth Finch, among others, and have been featured in AGNI Online, The Missouri Review’s Poem-of-the-Week, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and WNYC’s Radiolab. Arden is a Beloit Poetry Journal board member, a former editor at Epiphany Magazine, and a Best of the Net nominee. She lives in New York City, where her daily work focuses on housing affordability, homelessness prevention, and equitable community development. Musings and more at www.ardenlevine.com.
Praise for Ladies’ Abecedary:
Like a deck of playing cards, shuffled, fanned, dealt and swept away with a flourish, Arden Levine’s Ladies' Abecedary delights and dazzles. In this alphabetic parade, portraits of women’s lives flash past our eyes. Designated by only a letter and the “glittering shrapnel” and “high-heeled balancing acts” of Levine’s descriptions, we can’t be certain who or where or when these women live. Yet each life, each poem, feels vivid and energetic, bristling in forms that range from pantoums to prose poems. So we lean in closer to the mystery, keen to catch a fuller glimpse of each sharp life and not to miss the “twisting silver” sleight-of-hand taking place on the page.
—Kirun Kapur, author of Women in the Waiting Room, finalist for the National Poetry Series
The poems in Ladies’ Abecedary are self-aware “like warring starlings” and serve as a prayer to the imagination and craft. The female voices in these poems, ranging from cooks to scientists, push against stereotypes by exposing women’s “voices between walls.” They acknowledge the pursuit of safety, what women say to each other in secret, and how words help build identity. These women are more than just ladies. While Levine commits to the abecedary form, she is never a slave to it. Each poem has a volta, unexpected turns, deadpan humor, and windchimes. This collection belongs on your shelf.
—Cynthia Manick, author of Blue Hallelujiahs and founder/curator of Soul Sister Revue
Arden Levine’s extraordinary collection grapples with the questions of how women’s stories are documented. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes, “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” Ladies Abecedary is an audacious, feminist response to Woolf’s question. Levine’s readers measure the heat and violence done to the speakers of these stunning poems. While it is tempting to decipher which historical, popular culture, and literary figures feature in these captivating poems, the power of these poems accrues over the collection and exemplifies the diverse and complex nature of women’s interior and external lives. In the beginning of the collection, Levine writes, “B, little she, was told she could be whoever she wished/in the school pageant. So she chose God.” Near the end of the chapbook, Levine writes, “They’ve all forgotten her name.” Levine makes sure that even if we don’t know the names of each speaker, we know their stories. The collection exemplifies the importance of the project to reclaim voice, agency, and equality for women, in all their varied experiences, through history and in our current moment.
—Jennifer Franklin, No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018)
Read a review of “Ladies’ Abecedary” on Harbor Review by Cameron Morse.