Molly Spencer

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Edited by Jon Thompson

Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-433-4 (paperback, $19.95); 978-1-64317-434-1 (PDF, $9.99); 978-1-64317-435-8 (EPUB, $9.99). © 2024 by Parlor Press, 116 pages, 7.5 x 9.25" on 70# paper.

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What People Are Saying

In this luminous collection, Molly Spencer sets her infrared sight on the interstice between “shelter and glare,” that indeterminate spot where elements recombine and the world appears strangely remade – or, even more mysteriously, “found out.” Thresholds are frightening places, but Spencer trusts that destabilized ground is exactly where all encounters with “genuine rescue” occur. 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

“Wasn’t rowing at all, only dipping the blade of my one oar / here, then there, to steer a little,” yet or is the oar which sets Molly Spencer’s poems pleasingly amok in this masterful collection, Invitatory. Or rather, it’s inside the boundaries of the either-or, where Spencer explores breakage (and ruin) as the presage and/or the aftermath of intimacy, of language, of touch, of longing, and (yes) of loss. There is an intriguing muscularity happening here, a kind of muscle memory in which each poem, grafted tendon-like each to each, remembers, foresees, and challenges what happens in the other poems. Rather I should say, more 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

Description

Invitatory is an attempt to reckon with and reconcile the contradictions of a world, a life, that nourishes us with beauty and hope and wounds us with communal and personal devastations. These poems range in subject matter from planetary movements and the natural world, to war and migration, the image of the divine beloved, and the complexities of ordinary love. Using gestures of repetition and return, etymological explorations, and tentative assertions often soon reversed, Invitatory creates its own atmosphere. The collection probes the nature and reliability of language and perception with ephemeral and eternal imagery: oceans, horizons, rivers, borders, bridges, bird flight. In tightly linked poems, or rather, grafted onto one another, it values the poetic line as both a precise tool of inquiry and a chiseled last resort, and investigates the slippery territory of making. In Invitatory, readers will alternately detect George Oppen’s “traveling back and forth between things and words,” as Irwin Ehrenpreis put it in the New York Review of Books. Jorie Graham’s use of accumulation and suspension, Jean Valentine’s reticence, and Louise Glück’s searing self-skepticism. Ultimately, Invitatory’s purpose is to shape the ever-indeterminate gap where, again and again, we choose whether to turn away from the world as it is, or to pledge ourselves to it as it might one day be. At its root, this collection is an invitation to live in the world deeply and with clear-sightedness, purpose, and compassion for others and ourselves.

About the Author

Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, essayist, and editor. Her debut collection, If the House (2019), won the Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge​ (2020) won the Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. Molly’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. Her critical writing and essays have appeared at The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. Spencer’s work has been awarded the Lucile Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and an Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where she teaches writing at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

Photograph of the author by Focal Point Studios. Used by permission.