"With 26 poems teased from skin and tissue and veiny threads, Brooke MacKenzie's The Scary Abecedary resounds with brutality, fragility, and fear. A startling debut and a lesson for our times." -Lee Murray, four-time Bram Stoker Award?-winner and author of Tortured Willows

Abecedary [ ey-bee-see-duh-ree ]: The alphabet, written out in a teaching book, or carved on a wall; a primer

There are so many frightening things

And in imposing an alphabetic structure onto them, I am attempting to control and contain them. It is a futile effort to make everything seem less scary

Each letter of the alphabet has been assigned a fright.

Sometimes the poems are scary, sometimes they're gruesome, sometimes subversive,

Sometimes deeply personal

Because the definition of "scary" shifts and changes depending upon

The layers of feelings and experiences and moods

That cover our eyes like a film at any given moment

Our lenses shift and our pupils dilate and our minds go along for the ride

But there are so many frightening things

And they seem to multiply with each passing day?.

Will we ever be safe again?

Were we ever really safe at all?