The collection speaks to a very honest fear that lives in so many: that winter is coming and loss hovers on the horizon. “The world of Hinge expresses a need for fairy tales not because they take away pain, but because they represent it. Which is what, for me, makes Molly Spencer’s work remarkable and worth reading again and again.'- Twila Newey, EcoTheo Review 'If each 'I' in America could find the tenderness within struggle and pain, as Spencer does in her poems, I think we might find a way to find home in the inbetween, where there is space enough for all of us. “These lyric poems alter time, expanding temporality into a sort of epic and ominous endlessness.”- Alina Stefanescu, On the Seawall

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. 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. With the onset of a painful chronic illness, the body and mental geography turn hostile and alien. Spencer alternates between the clinical and the domestic, disorientation and reorientation, awe and awareness. 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. In these alluring poems, myth becomes part of the arsenal used to confront the flaws and failures of our fallible bodies. In myth and memory, through familiar stories reimagined, she constructs poetry for anyone who has ever stumbled, unwillingly, into a wilderness. 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. Finding joy and beauty in the face of suffering

Hinge by Molly Spencer