Invitatory, coming June 11, 2024 from Parlor Press!
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Invitatory hovers in a space between worlds: one disintegrating, one yet unformed; outside of time, but teeming with the desires time presents. Probing the nature and reliability of language and perception, the contours of human suffering, and the complexities of ordinary love, Invitatory insists that we confront the world, and ourselves in it, and invites us to pledge ourselves to the world as it is and as it might one day be.
Preorder now at bookshop.org or your favorite independent bookstore!
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What people are saying:
Undaunted by the ever-slippery nature of language, Spencer tracks words like a bird dog, or guide to the underworld, crafting, in poem after gorgeous poem, the most intimate forms of invitation, that we, too might recognize likeness between self and other, and hold our deepest yearnings with compassion. --Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers More a body than just a collection of poems, Invitatory isn’t afraid to show its math. Images—well-wrought, evocative, and cinematic the first time—are reconsidered again and again, yet somehow appear sharper, more vivid, more surprising with each iteration. Spencer has created a living thing that is sure to outlive all of us lucky enough to hold it for a while. --Tommye Blount, author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue |
Hinge, co-winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition
“Through legend and landscape, in her lush and razor-sharp lines, Molly Spencer’s newest collection, Hinge, navigates mothering and the passage of time in the throes of chronic illness. Her poems illuminate what it means to inhabit a body turning on itself, to come to knowledge by loss and by absence. These are poems that exquisitely tend to the work of living.” --Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, author of Water & Salt
“In Hinge, Molly Spencer speaks to us from both sides of a door ajar. As observer and observed, mother and patient, the poet recounts her constant movement between deep interior darknesses and the thin winter light outside. Tender and profound, Hinge’s powerful portrait of survival offers us a thing with feathers—a hope that flits between rooms, from shadow to light, before settling down to stay. What an extraordinary collection, every line fueled by a resilient, remarkable heart.” --Jennifer Richter, author of No Acute Distress and Threshold
“Molly Spencer’s stunning collection Hinge refracts the subjects of childhood, marriage, and parenthood through chiseled, mythologizing language, such that domestic life becomes elevated into the full lyric complexity it deserves. At the same time, a narrative of illness and autoimmunity cuts across the book, creating a ‘wraith’ of the speaker that ‘flickers, / moonlit, on [medical] screens.’ Not only does the language in Hinge feel hard-won in the best sense, but so, too, do its domestic spaces themselves. ‘Every day is a creation story,’ Spencer tell us in these layered, moving poems, reminding us of the simple fact that our private rooms full of ‘metronomic’ breathing are, ultimately, where a ‘life will happen.’” --Wayne Miller, author of Post-
“Through legend and landscape, in her lush and razor-sharp lines, Molly Spencer’s newest collection, Hinge, navigates mothering and the passage of time in the throes of chronic illness. Her poems illuminate what it means to inhabit a body turning on itself, to come to knowledge by loss and by absence. These are poems that exquisitely tend to the work of living.” --Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, author of Water & Salt
“In Hinge, Molly Spencer speaks to us from both sides of a door ajar. As observer and observed, mother and patient, the poet recounts her constant movement between deep interior darknesses and the thin winter light outside. Tender and profound, Hinge’s powerful portrait of survival offers us a thing with feathers—a hope that flits between rooms, from shadow to light, before settling down to stay. What an extraordinary collection, every line fueled by a resilient, remarkable heart.” --Jennifer Richter, author of No Acute Distress and Threshold
“Molly Spencer’s stunning collection Hinge refracts the subjects of childhood, marriage, and parenthood through chiseled, mythologizing language, such that domestic life becomes elevated into the full lyric complexity it deserves. At the same time, a narrative of illness and autoimmunity cuts across the book, creating a ‘wraith’ of the speaker that ‘flickers, / moonlit, on [medical] screens.’ Not only does the language in Hinge feel hard-won in the best sense, but so, too, do its domestic spaces themselves. ‘Every day is a creation story,’ Spencer tell us in these layered, moving poems, reminding us of the simple fact that our private rooms full of ‘metronomic’ breathing are, ultimately, where a ‘life will happen.’” --Wayne Miller, author of Post-
If the house, winner of the 2019 Brittingham Prize
“The eponymous house of If the House is at once literal and figurative. There’s the impulse toward an idea of domesticity that begins here with finding a house within which to shape a life, or try to. Memory, too, is a house here—and in these poems, to make of memory a home becomes an act just as brave and honest—and all the lovelier for both—as the poems themselves.”--Carl Phillips, contest judge
“Molly Spencer’s If the House leads her to places more inward than is safe to go. Her portrait of life’s silences is fundamental and mysterious. Here is a riveting, deeply moving book of marriage and its dissolutions—between husband and wife, between a woman and her home, between dream and memory—rendered as a beautiful, complex metaphor for the most veiled and vulnerable parts of our existence.”--David Biespiel, author of Republic Café
"Spencer’s flat-out terrific debut collection of poems embraces the spirit of duende. Houses, meadows, lakes, even memories are places of refuge, but also pain. Through fresh, haunting imagery, Spencer exposes the ‘inevitable cracks’ of the domestic, love’s sorrows and shortfalls.”--Ellen Bass author of Indigo.
“The eponymous house of If the House is at once literal and figurative. There’s the impulse toward an idea of domesticity that begins here with finding a house within which to shape a life, or try to. Memory, too, is a house here—and in these poems, to make of memory a home becomes an act just as brave and honest—and all the lovelier for both—as the poems themselves.”--Carl Phillips, contest judge
“Molly Spencer’s If the House leads her to places more inward than is safe to go. Her portrait of life’s silences is fundamental and mysterious. Here is a riveting, deeply moving book of marriage and its dissolutions—between husband and wife, between a woman and her home, between dream and memory—rendered as a beautiful, complex metaphor for the most veiled and vulnerable parts of our existence.”--David Biespiel, author of Republic Café
"Spencer’s flat-out terrific debut collection of poems embraces the spirit of duende. Houses, meadows, lakes, even memories are places of refuge, but also pain. Through fresh, haunting imagery, Spencer exposes the ‘inevitable cracks’ of the domestic, love’s sorrows and shortfalls.”--Ellen Bass author of Indigo.