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Molly Spencer's Hinge,
​by Despy Boutris

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There is so much to say about Molly Spencer’s Hinge. 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. Perhaps above everything, though, this is a book about the body—one that chronicles illness, chronic pain, and loss.
 
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. Throughout the collection, Spencer reckons with lupus’s nebulousness, its “vague / constellations of symptoms” (24). 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:
 
                                                                           turn
               again toward the ransacked room
 

               
of your body. (15)
 

                                                                                            ...

               You’ve looked inside the dim house
               of your body for years, at the blurred threshold. (21)
 

                                                                                            ...

               Now you are a warped doorway
               into which your children have folded
               their bodies. (27)

                                                                                            ...

               Here is the mirror
               where your eyes drag over
               the bleak walls
               of your body. (50)
 

                                                                                            ...

                              It may
 

               be the stuck hinge
                              of your body loosening
               at last. (61)

 
                                                                                            ...

                                                                                          Open wide
               this breakable body, this hard-won room, this house
               of luck and bone. (69)

                                                                                            ... 

               A tender trap—the body you’ve learned
 

               to live in. Its subtle bars, a window scuffed
               with years and small storms. (75)
 
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). ⋆
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​
​Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, editor, and writing instructor. Her debut collection, If the House won the 2019 Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge​ (SIU Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, won the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and an MPA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and teaches writing at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. ​

Despy Boutris's writing has been published or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she lives in California and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.
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