Arden Levine
Finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series, Spoke is a 2025 selection for The Word Works’ Hilary Tham Capital Collection.
Arden Levine’s debut full-length collection, Spoke, follows a woman cycling across the precarious terrain of heredity and legacy against the traffic of early trauma and grief. Part elegy for a parent lost young, part coming-of-age story-in-verse, part Generation X cultural inventory, Levine navigates accidents, sorrow, and urban landscapes with wit, cheek, and an excellent mix-tape.
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Spoke creates a tender and forensic taxonomy, as surprising as it is capacious. 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 (W.W. Norton)
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. 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 (New Directions)
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 (Copper Canyon Press)