Mollys recent poetry has appeared in Blackbird, FIELD. In an interview with Ann Arbor District Library, Spencer says, “What writing about it did for me was allow me to transform my suffering into something more than suffering.” Amid the chronic pain Spencer’s forced to endure, she searches for meaning, writing “Tell me / this is worth something-that I’ll burn / a blacker trail along the earth.” In this collection, she works through the realities of living in her own body-a dim house, a ransacked room-a sometimes-painful home she has had to “learn to live in.” And one that “lets the light in, even so” (75). A second collection, Hinge (2020) won the Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. This breakable body, this hard-won room, this house Of your body for years, at the blurred threshold. In “Patient Years,” she writes, “The doctor says, // We may never know.” It seems as though Spencer can only speak about her body in metaphor-most often, as a house she cannot escape: Throughout the collection, Spencer reckons with lupus’s nebulousness, its “vague / constellations of symptoms” (24). Titles of poems such as “Love Poem for Lupus” and “Flare” let readers in on Spencer’s biography: this is a writer who lives with a sometimes-debilitating disease, defined as when one’s immune system attacks its own tissues and organs. At the same time, a narrative of illness and autoimmunity cuts across the book, creating a ‘wraith’ of the. Perhaps above everything, though, this is a book about the body-one that chronicles illness, chronic pain, and loss. 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. This book-the first collection that she wrote, although it is the second one to be published-addresses climate change it speaks about motherhood and it includes poems that embody mythological characters such as Demeter, Persephone, Lot’s wife, Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Peter Pan’s Wendy. There is so much to say about Molly Spencer’s Hinge.

Hinge by Molly Spencer