Arden Levine
Spoke
The Word Works, 2026
One way to approach Spoke, Arden Levine’s striking debut collection of poems, is through a consideration of its cover art, where Ron Terner’s sexy and evocative 1980s photograph captures a young, leggy, bare-footed woman seated on a “male” ten-speed bike at a payphone in City Island, New York. That woman’s bold yet vulnerable demeanor—still palpable four decades later—furnishes the confident, unapologetic poems in Spoke with an apt visual equivalent, for in these very poems Levine’s confrontation with a bygone world, its memories and losses, provides the means through which she articulates and navigates the present. If a male gaze frames the female body in Terner’s Diane on the Pay Phone, Levine’s decision to reframe it as a controlling metaphor for her collection is at once homage and reclamation. Through a ruthless, unsentimental confrontation with near and distant pasts, Levine exposes “the familiar uncomfortable and / the accustomed unpleasant” (“X-ray”) we attach ourselves to as a way to stanch our unbearable hurt.
The finest poems in Spoke seize upon concise yet epiphanic moments with photographic force. In “Playground Accident,” a child hits the pavement, opens one of her eyes and sees “a light bulb sun shattered / its reflections raining a graveyard of shells.” In “Remaining Evidence,” a woman, slowly accepting the loss of a former lover, observes “Crumbs pattern the plate // like footsteps in snow.” Elsewhere (“Disease”), Levine recalls that her father “once pointed out delicate maggots, like freshwater pearls, debriding the open oyster of a kneecap.” Such details clarify turbulent visceral experience with economy, yet suggest, beyond the controlled borders of pressurized language, vast regions of unexposed feeling. In “Kitchen Counter Prelude, 10:00 P.M.,” a woman and a man “leave the bed for a moment / hungry for apples.” The man, a musician, slices the fruit on a plate in “curves the size of a child’s grip.” His two sons (who visited earlier that weekend) may be absent, but their existence is felt in his current attentions. Following the snack, a session at the piano leads to a bout of lovemaking, after which the woman contemplates that way in which “he cut the offering seeds / from the severed core of the fruit // and discarded them quickly.” In just a few lines, Levine vividly captures one’s man’s psychology—the way he segments portions of his life to ensure their separateness. Whether those discarded seeds refer to his lover or to his sons is left ambiguous, a problem for the poem’s speaker (and the reader) to ponder. Such uncertainty is often jarring, always exciting—and sometimes heartbreakingly beautiful. “A Dress” is another case in point. Here, as the speaker takes a Friday night walk with a man over the Williamsburg Bridge, he tells her of a former lover, a woman for whom he bought a dress she would not wear. “I tell him if he bought me a dress, // I’d wear it just because he’d bought it.” But instead of accepting the obvious gift she has made of herself, the man looks ahead in silence: “His eyes are held at some point / near the end of the bridge, the other side.”
Another compelling through-line in Spoke is evident in Levine’s “father” poems, many involving the presence of a bike. The first of these, “(Bicycle: 1984) Abandon” is quoted in full: