A is for Everyone

A Is for Everyone subverts the children's-alphabet-book format. Every letter routes back to "A," and inside that frame Dennis Vanderspek layers surreal parables, anthropomorphic fables, prose-poem meditations, and deadpan comedy: a sequence of short pieces that read together as a single form rather than a glossary.

Pell's citation reads it as Edson-like: plainspoken prose poems whose internal logic skews.

A Is for Everyone won the 2021 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, recognized for the originality of its form and the plainspoken precision of its language.