That Spencer begins the poem with “everyone” is important because it signals to the reader that what’s coming in the poem is not unusual, no matter how much we might like it to be. For example, look at these lines from “Girl with Book and Angel.” The opening lines suggest a situation that’s disturbing not just because of what it describes, but because of how familiar it is. Instead, these poems cut and clean and bind and then look for ways to survive until the next time.īefore I tell you more, a quick reminder that in order to receive your early copy of Hinge, read along with the Poetry Book Club, and participate in our exclusive chat with Molly Spencer, you’ll need to subscribe by September 15!īack to Spencer’s poems. But her poems don’t explode, because there’s there’s too much going on in life to deal with an explosion or clean up its aftermath. Many of the poems in Hinge are about subjects that might lead the reader to expect outburst: poems about family disruption and dealing with chronic illness, about children and the endings and beginnings of things. I think it’s the way her poems are both intimate and reticent at the same time.
I’ve been trying to get at what makes Molly Spencer’s poems so intriguing for a while now, but especially since I started reading Hinge, her second collection-though, as she points out in the acknowledgements, the first one she wrote.
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