Alphabet Year

These poems started with a bag of children's 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 world's constant noise. Because the proper abecedarians have a more orderly arrangement with the universe simply by virtue of progressing through the alphabet the way it's 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-Duggan's Alphabet Year. The poet's 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-Duggan's 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 ofGargoyle Magazine ""In my joyous and tricky romp through Alphabet Year, I discovered exhilarating ways of putting words together; I discovered words I didn't 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 ""InAlphabet 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 ofBoston 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).