"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?