An abecedary, or abecedarium, is a primer for teaching the alphabet: Arden Levine begins Ladies’ Abecedary with an epigraph from an article in The Atlantic, 1859, “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” It is all the more poignant, then, that Levine assign each of the letters of the alphabet to an individual woman, in a spectacular narrative array, who is in some way oppressed, or afflicted, under patriarchy: P, for instance, who “can’t have any part of her / body touching any other / part of her body,” or E whose body transforms in the hands of her surgeon into the very book that he uses to explain “the procedure / and what it would be like after.” 

Practically speaking, Levine’s project is ideal for the chapbook: Ladies’ Abecedary contains 24 poems, each titled after a letter; “C & D” share and “W & X.” The poems are as formally diverse as the disparate women, or “ladies” they depict: “K,” a sestina, “E” a pantoum, and of course organic form poems like “C & D,” or “U”:

had made two wrong assumptions:

1) that you could find the missing

    either with maps or with technology. 

2) that words would keep you safe. 

Levine’s historical consciousness of the oppression of women who were not taught, not primed, in order to share power and participate in an egalitarian society permeates her book with this sense of danger. “K,” for instance, among the wildest, mythopoetic, almost parabolic poems in the collection, describes a group of ten sisters who drop stones on their daily trek into blinding snow and listen for the report . . . surrounded by unseeable cliffs. Their task is Sisyphean, a daily grind, like F’s, who has to remake cherry pies after dropping “a tray of eight” at the bakery. We never learn the purpose of the sisters’ excursions. 

Something almost sinister begins to form in the women. H beholds the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe: He “revealed himself” as a black fly, “her only visitor.” O lifts “a millipede from the dirt” and the suggestion is that she eats it. L

claims to him that she’s not the type 

to drape herself in serpents and offer 

curious apples . . .

She’s no Eve, in other words. She rejects the role of Eve as B chooses the part of God in the school pageant. These are women who transcend their victimhood. Who own their lives. They “roll dough” after the tray crashes to the floor. They find love in each other’s arms, like W & X, and love themselves, as Levine loves them. 

November, 2021