Alphabet deepens Atlas’s engagement with the role of the writer in particular, calling attention to the way language, down to its smallest parts, can create meaning and be nourishment. (Vandenberg writes, in “M,” “I think of books as milk from other animals.”) In “O, P, R, S (Eye / Mouth / Head / Tongue),” Vandenberg’s eye becomes a microscope, finding the helixes that mean “the ribbon of my life is thin.” Watching for deer on the highway becomes a meditation on the word “deer” itself, which, the poem tells us, meant “any untamed thing that breathes,” from “the Sanskrit for he perishes.” The deer walking out of the woods, the poet riding in the passenger seat are aligned in a sudden, single category by their signs: the alphabet reorganizes the world, and what is “inside” and what is “outside” are not as stable as they might seem. In “D Ghazal” (there are several poems of this form in the book), we track the object “D” from the Book of Kells to a chapter book where “children color in its middle,” and back to the Phonecian “daleth, a crude door” and Greek “delta, / the river’s maw.” But “D” is not only a public symbol (for “Deliberate, Dust, Dinosaur. […] Donkey, Doo-hickey, Don’t”). “D” is also for “Dopplegänger, shadow boy,” and for “your death I hold / against the light of November.” The poet is “pure amber that trapped / your boyhood self.” The world of pure text, where “gold-leafed D” lives in a holy manuscript is the same world where the poet holds reckoning with an interior court, giving herself “a [daleth], the door that faces backward.” The poem unites the written sign and the things the writer can do with it.

Through the alphabet’s power to gather and to name, Vandenberg senses, perceives, and interacts with the world. More than that: she contains it, while acknowledging it cannot be contained.

Through the alphabet’s power to gather and to name, Vandenberg senses, perceives, and interacts with the world. More than that: she contains it, while acknowledging it cannot be contained. In the book’s first poem, she writes that in “one Nordbrandt poem I like, ‘A,’ // ‘Already in the word’s first letter / the word is already there / and in the word already, the whole sentence. /… / as the a- // lmond tree is in each almond” (“Prologue: A Ghazal”). In A there are apples, almonds, oxen and poets, alienation. There are assholes in A; it is a world limited in scale but not in scope. Lots fits in: both “the Lord” and “Katrina” have the power to say in it. Vandenberg claims the power of speech and writing at once, naming herself as is customary at the end of the ghazal, and putting her own name — the name of a woman, name of a poet — in the same grammatical location as “Lord” one line previous. “Saith the Lord, ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’ // Saith Katrina, ‘Already the pure child and all the unborn inside it / have been forgotten with the path the ox broke through the snow.” The alphabet is a sign of the ability to make sense out of immeasurable and senseless loss, a way of seeing patterns, which in itself can be comfort when there is little. The spontaneous abortion referred to in “Prologue,” the questions surrounding the death of a young family member, the assaults and rapes of people known and unknown to the poet make holes in the fabric of representation and of meaning. While these tears are not patched by Vandenberg’s ordering of the world, we find that her ordering provides us with the fact of beauty (fuchsias, “a house / made of trees sagging with dates and mercy,” Saint Kevin with a bird’s egg and the bird in his palm). In these poems, the fact that “your father hit / your four-year-old stepbrother / until / he was dead” is inseparable from the saint holding the nest in his palm. No matter how they are ordered, they cannot make the book’s complete sense without one another.

In the last poem of the collection — another ghazal, “Z,” this time — Vandenberg writes “The author should say something has changed by the end. / What if Z hasn’t always been the alphabet’s end? […] In the end // we forge pure silver spears, and Katrina makes peace with nothing.” The presence of the past and of the effects of the past on the present run through most of the book (in particular in poems like “The Autumn Our Babysitter Was Murdered by Her Boyfriend,” “Live Through This,” “My Sister Visits Her Ex in Prison Once A Year to Ask Him Whether He Did It,” and “Making Her Black Bean Chili Again”). There is no “end” to be arrived at, no place where the past stops living with the present. Every marriage, even the ones between this time and that, this language and that, this system of signs and that, must “feed its ghosts, or they’ll never let you be” (“Making Her Black Bean Chili Again”). Vandenberg’s “Katrina” makes peace with nothing, and from her restlessness we have this book, a search after meaning which assures us finally that “naming is nothing like being or knowing” (“K”). In the end, the set of things which are — “gardens and florists, also French / taxicab drivers and STDs” — are “with only a poor handful / of letters, hard to explain” (“E”).