Description
Finding joy and beauty in the face of suffering
Readers enter "a stunted world," where landmarks--a river, a house, a woman's own body--have become unrecognizable in a place as distorted and dangerous as any of the old tales poet Molly Spencer remasters in this elegant, mournful collection. In myth and memory, through familiar stories reimagined, she constructs poetry for anyone who has ever stumbled, unwillingly, into a wilderness. In these alluring poems, myth becomes part of the arsenal used to confront the flaws and failures of our fallible bodies. Shadowing the trajectory of an elegy, this poetry collection of lament, remembrance, and solace wrestles with how we come to terms with suffering while still finding joy, meaning, and beauty. Spencer alternates between the clinical and the domestic, disorientation and reorientation, awe and awareness. With the onset of a painful chronic illness, the body and mental geography turn hostile and alien. In loss and grief, in physical and psychological landscapes, Spencer searches the relationship between a woman's body and her house--places where she is both master and captive--and hunts for the meaning of suffering. Finally, with begrudging acceptance, we have a hypothesis for all seasons: there is suffering, there is mercy; they are not separate but are for and of one another.
Author: Molly Spencer
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Published: 10/20/2020
Pages: 96
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.90w x 0.40d
ISBN13: 9780809337972
ISBN10: 0809337975
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General
About the Author
Molly Spencer's poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, FIELD, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She is a poetry editor at Rumpus. Her debut collection, If the House, won the 2019 Brittingham Prize, selected by Carl Phillips.