Alphabet Year

These poems started with a bag of childrens beach toys--primary-colored alphabet sand-molds--and a quiet afternoon. They ended up needing a spreadsheet to keep track of the first words. Love is the L word for all the disorderly abecedarians because it creates a thread with which to gather all the ribbons of art religion human cruelty anger and the infinite intrusions by the random that both buffer us from a frequently distressing world and buffet us with that same worlds constant noise. Because the proper abecedarians have a more orderly arrangement with the universe simply by virtue of progressing through the alphabet the way its supposed to line up the L words shift and wiggle even as the poems fun-house-mirror each other. Ultimately the poems reach for peace without demanding either understanding or patience deciding that it is not only necessary but lovely to dance with the monsters underneath our beds. I thought I knew my ABCs--until I read Devon Miller-Duggans Alphabet Year. The poets collection of both disorderly and proper abecedarians accomplishes a technical tour-de-force that challenges and delights an adherence to form that mysteriously unleashes language at its most spiritual penetrating and free. These are poems to explore and savor many times over. --Tania Runyan Author of Second Sky Miller-Duggans word games are as close as most of us will ever get to the Pornographic Priestess of the Beatles I Am the Walrus fame. Equal parts Scrabble sex Tarot crossword acid trip and theology pureed in a phrontistery mixer set at warp speed her poems are difficult repetitive uncanny and wrong in all the right ways like something Circe conjured up to pass the time. --Richard Peabody Editor of Gargoyle Magazine In my joyous and tricky romp through Alphabet Year I discovered exhilarating ways of putting words together; I discovered words I didnt know words that can be used to stitch and hold back impending chaos words I now keep like pets. Alphabet Year is a book like no other I have read. It dives with zest into the turbulent ocean of language. With improbable love it wrestles against human cruelty time and death. This is an important book. --Jeanne Murray Walker Author of Helping the Morning In Alphabet Year Miller-Duggan tests whether we know the world and our language as well as we think. Through inventively paired poems she alternately frames this as a philosophical dilemma--how to categorize the seasons speak of angels or know if the holy abides in disaster--and as a more immediate crisis of how amidst dark days we are to make lives with our miraculous wounded loved ones. An ambitious triumph of avant-garde formalism. --Adam McGee Managing Editor of Boston Review Devon Miller-Duggan is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Pinning the Bird to the Wall (2008) and Neither Prayer Nor Bird (2013).