Poetry by Arden Levine, reviewed by Monica Wendel
SPOKE (Word Works Books)

In 1962, James Watson and Francis Crick, drawing on research from Rosalind Franklin, discovered the structure of DNA. I don’t want to give you a Wikipedia entry (my editor already told me that this paragraph is too long). What’s important here are the implications: this discovery, for better or worse, changed our understanding of who we are and how our ancestors’ genetic history is encoded within us— prompting critical scientific breakthroughs as well as pseudoscientific racist and sexist bullshit (most of which came from Watson himself). Clearly, it’s a complicated legacy.

It’s also one that we grapple with in an immediate way, or at least I do. What have I inherited from my parents? What did I pass onto my child? And don’t even get me started on epigenetics and the body keeping the score. Arden Levine considers such questions in her debut poetry collection, Spoke, as she writes about a father’s suicide and wonders what the speaker has inherited. That sounds depressing, and, at times, it is. But Levine expands the reader’s experience with a characteristic mix of brashness and whimsy, the ability to enjoy language and hear the music of a line, and the talent of going beyond puns to push at the boundaries of how we define terms. 

Take the book title, Spoke. Levine opens by quoting from Anybody’s Bike Book: An Original Manual of Bike Repairs (Cuthbertson 1971): “Remember that you are not trying to make a perfect wheel. You are trying to cause a general movement of the rim without putting too much or too little tension on any one spoke.” She sets out her project here, aiming not for perfection but for repair, and doing so with gentleness. Clearly, “spoke” refers both to the act of speaking and to the physical part of the bicycle.

Bicycles serve as an organizing force in this book, with sections titled  “Derailleur,” “Shifter,” “Bracket,” and “Cassette” (all parts of a bike) and reappearing as images throughout the poems. Again, Levine demonstrates an ear for puns; the “Cassette” section brings together poems about music, and the section “Shifter” shifts the book. The poems move forward in a loose chronology, charged with an expression of joy that’s often rooted in language itself. A word can be so many things, the poems seem to be saying. 

As can a person. The speaker considers the ways in which her life has, and has not, will, and will not, follow her father’s. What is inherited? The poem “(Bicycle: 2009) Fortune,” as Levine writes in her endnotes, “references Jean-Baptise Lamarck’s curious theory that offspring will take on a parent’s acquired traits.” (79) Lamarck believed that the changes a body undergoes during a lifespan, such as a blacksmith’s muscles growing stronger from use or a giraffe stretching its neck higher and higher, get passed on to offspring. While epigenetic research bears some resemblance to Lamarck’s ideas and is a growing and necessary field, we know that specific traits acquired during a person’s lifespan are not inheritable. (Generations of babies being circumcised has not led to a decrease in the number of male children born with foreskin.) Still, the speaker nods at “Lamarckian evolution” as she considers the strange ways that her own scars map onto the pattern set by her father:

I, too, would shatter a tooth when I turned twelve
(though I’d repair it better) and would scar
my abdomen from contact with a sharp surface

(surgical in his case, geological in mine).
I’ve mapped it out. At thirty-six, I’ll cut open my face
doing a stupid thing. (26)

Do we inherit the “stupid things” our parents did? Is it our “Fortune,” as Levine titles the poem? But just as quickly, the speaker turns: “Or maybe not,” she writes in the poem’s penultimate stanza. (26) As simple as that, the speaker dismisses the fortune-telling, questioning the “cup of bones” used to tell the future as “scrambled.” 

Those sudden shifts, the emphasis on puns, and the irreverence toward grief is consistent throughout the book, as in the poem “[Funeral Guests],” where the speaker refuses to play the part of a bereaved child at her father’s funeral:

I’m so sorry, one [guest] says, then notices
the quelled face, the casual limbs.
How are you all holding up?

Through a mouthful of crumbs,
[I answer] dryly: Hungry. I hope
your condolences are edible. (16)

I couldn’t help but wonder, or imagine, if this way of speaking and of looking at the world, this way of responding with truth and immediacy, is one that the child-speaker learned from her father. That just as she finds herself looking askance in the world, looking at things through puns and fingers sticky with cake, if he did the same. If, like him, she found convention bewildering. This bewilderment is illustrated in the poem “Prayer Card Photograph” as she employs a beautiful backwards slant:

Once, I pictured him [my father] as Lewis Carroll,

kindred companion in condition,

slashing with vorpal pen

at the Jabberwocky that hid amongst

synapses and axons.

I wonder if that mix of wonder and befuddlement is her inheritance, no matter how that inheritance was acquired. 

The connection between the speaker and the father is palpable in a variety of forms. In “(Requiem: 1965),” another poem in the final section, “Cassette,” the speaker imagines playing catch with her father, considering “what dad was throwing…” (74) Back and forth go Paul Simon’s song lyrics, puns, a baseball, memories, dreams, and the imagined; the stanzas move back and forth across the page. 

So often, we think of inheritance as something that gets passed down without a choice. In this understanding, the child has no choice but to inherit something from the parent, to carry it on their back — or on their bike. But in Levine’s telling, inheritance is more like a baseball: something passed to us, yes, but also something we first learn to catch and then choose whether or not to catch. “(Requiem: 1965)” ends with the lines: “and I would // take the glove off and say oh my God.” (74) Similarly, in the poem “(Car w/ a Girl) Cleaning Out a Motherfucker,” the speaker, while cleaning out her deceased father’s car, drops his voluminous papers “all unread, into garbage bags.” (19) Throughout Spoke, the speaker removes the baseball glove. She trashes the papers. She walks — or, in this collection’s telling, cycles — in a different direction.

I’m not saying that this idea of agency is simple. I’m not trying to discount epigenetics and inherited trauma. I’m not saying that the body doesn’t keep the score. But genetics are not destiny; our futures are not prewritten and wired into ourselves. Spoke demonstrates the double meaning of the word cycle, referring both to a means of transportation (as in cycling on a bike) and an inescapable loop that prevents someone from moving forward. The reason a pun gives that electric tingle is that it really does mean both things at once. 

Love, in this telling, is not an inheritance. Love is not a thing passed down to us. Instead, love is a fellow traveler, a companion on our journey:

Love is walking, assertively walking.
It is announcing, loudly announcing.
Get up! Love is going by!

If you are asleep wake up! If you are writing,
come have a look at love, here in the flesh!
If you are making love, keep doing that.

Lovely. (70)

Lovely, indeed. 

Spoke by Arden Levine was published by Word Works Books in April 2026.

Monica Wendel‘s writing has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Ploughshares, Rattle, and other journals. She is Professor of Composition and Creative Writing at St. Thomas Aquinas College, where she has taught since 2010. 

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Book Reviews.