Molly Spencer's Hinge,
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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). ⋆ |
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.
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.