i n t e r v i e w

COMP: Congratulations on the publication of your debut poetry collection, Spoke (The Word Works, 2026)! It’s a brilliant and profound book that stereoscopes through the past, mapping family dynamics (geographically and emotionally) and honoring various refusals to fulfill gendered expectations: “Should she add some feminine flourishes, / perhaps roses at the ends of each aggressive point?”

      Let’s begin with the title—both a noun and a past-tense verb. For us, the title invokes the image of a zoetrope, animating a series of images by speed, spin, and connection to a center. When did you arrive at this title? How much of the book had been composed or conceived?

Arden Levine: That title, and its section title friends (derailleur, shifter, bracket, and cassette), crashed the party at an audaciously late hour. The manuscript was ‘scripped: the poems had been milling around for a while, they’d staked out their shapes and order. But they needed stage-direction. The pun-loving part of me (which I’m afraid might be all of me) had a notion that a list of bicycle components with hey-neat-trick homophonic second-meanings would provide some sound superstructure. And indeed…

A derailleur can move the bike chain; it is also event that throws you out of the chain of events. A shifter lets you change gears; it is also a person or thing that changes shape or identity. A bracket holds opposing pedals together so they can rotate; also, as a contronym, it self-opposes (holds things in, keeps things out). A cassette clusters the cogs so that the rider’s body can handle the terrain; it is also a media format with which Gen Xers handled the terrains of their adolescence. And a spoke, a thin but strong strand that connects hub to rim, the critical center to the fragile edge, is also the statement already made, the verbal ligature (or legerdemain) invoking past within present.

That these five words slot into and summarize collection with precision I credit mostly to luck. But, it’s especially good luck.

C: Can you discuss your use of brackets (which also bears a double meaning)? Perhaps they disguise identity—that is, somebody’s name. “I go to dinner with [a man],” begins your poem “Small Circles.” But they also often destabilize; one feels the variability, or optionality, of a poem’s elements. Do you think the use of brackets corresponds to the book’s engagement with fragmentation (of memory, experience, conception of self and others)?

AL: Short answer: Yep; you nailed it. Longer answer: Brackets imply that the content between brackets is temporarily missing, permanently lost, or waiting to be filled/replaced (like memory, or like the individuals that the memory contained). Parentheses, likewise, imply that the content between the brackets is half-present, non-load-bearing, or spoken at a quieter volume. So, in this way, the brackets and parentheses serve almost like lenses in a camera; they bring the background into focus when the subject is in the foreground; they move the daughter/woman from narrator to narrated and back again; and they expand the aperture so that a crowd of specific characters becomes a blurry field of indistinct identities.

One of my objectives in crafting this collection was to present a forthrightness of language while also leaving enough blank and grainy spaces that the reader keeps squinting: it seems obvious, it stays circumscribed. But, here’s another thing about brackets and parentheses: they can create or undermine balance. In so many of its poems, Spoke plays with the concept of the binary: The left hand versus the right, the left pedal up and right pedal down, the choice of direction that caused the continuation or the crash. In a book of poems hyperconscious of linear alignment, it made sense to seed the whole paginal landscape with bipolar punctuation marks.

C: Spoke is chockful of formal invention. In addition to the four “Requiem” poems, there is a eulogy, a sonnet, an ekphrastic poem, a poem with both black and grayscale text; there are prose poems, poems in columns, poems examining inventory, evidence, clothes, food. In general, how did these forms develop and how did you know they belonged in the same book? Likewise, how did a musician(s) and their song become a candidate for one of your “Requiem” poems?

AL: This won’t immediately sound like an answer to your question, but stick with me… For over two decades, I’ve worked in housing policy and community development, specifically the creation, maintenance, and revitalization of homes and neighborhoods alongside their present and future residents. In one way or another, I’m always constructing compartments and contexts in which occupants will, ideally, settle and flourish. And if poems are living spaces (and I meant that in both ways: spaces that breathe, spaces where inhabitants breathe), the poet is spatial designer, coaxing optimal interaction between its occupants and creating niches in which objects can rest or reflect what holds them. (In poems like “Middle,” “An Analysis of Love,” and, certainly, “Construct,” this engineering metaphor isn’t even a metaphor.)

In an earlier issue of COMP, I mentioned that I prefer to custom-build poetic forms that sheath poem’s content and array the words like modular furniture; so, resident needs first, design specs second. (I’ve also written an essay on the similarities and shared significance in poem-making and urban space-making.) A similar logic applies with the “Requiem” poems, which press the conditions of specific memories through references to corresponding pop songs: I didn’t craft the poems in order to honor the music – I invoked the music as I-beams for the individual poems and bolts for the collection as a whole. As I have this tendency to let the poems draft their own blueprints, you get a feel for why Spoke has such a variety of forms. And those forms belong together in a single collection for the same reason a hi-rise with 100 apartments belongs on the same block as a pizza parlor, a tree pit, a hair salon, and a dog run… I’m not building pod communities; I’m building street scenes.

C: Spoke is a thoroughly feminist text. Your poems “Dupont Circle,” “To: Anxiety,” and “Cake”—just to name a few—seem in dialogue with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and especially Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur. Your poems often deliver caustic curves and wry commentary disguised as baked goods (“exquisite petit fours with gum paste daisies”) or romantic ballads (“My love, someday you will die and I will / never know”). Who are the feminist artists and thinkers whose work you held close during the writing of Spoke?

AL: Many. Artists, like Barbara Krueger and Judy Chicago, whose text and textiles fill walls and rooms and who convey plain truths without mourning shrouds. Activist-scholars, like June Jordan and Mab Segrest, who present social justice as work done with bare hands. Scientists, like Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and Dr. Ruth Behar, who craft stories from data and come to their subjects (in the cosmos, the lab, and the field) with integrity, curiosity, and vulnerability. And perhaps most specifically for Spoke, Alison Bechdel, whose book Fun Home (an illustrated novel of father/daughter dynamics whose panels are perfect micro-poems) instructed me on how a sequence of primary documents can become the chassis of a tragicomic. I was never interested in producing a sad story in minor keys – through their media and techniques, these thinkers inspired me to produce something hopefully higher-octane, a set of chords that let readers pump the pedals and blow through the lights.

Arden Levine is the author of Spoke (The Word Works' Hilary Tham Capital Collection, 2026; National Poetry Series Finalist, 2024), and Ladies' Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021). Her writing appears in Barrow Street, Harvard Review, RHINO, Indiana Review, The Offing, and elsewhere, and has been featured by Poetry Society of America and the Poetry Foundation. Arden is an urban planner and municipal public servant working/living in/for New York City. More at www.ardenlevine.com.