'Molly Spencer's stunning collection Hinge refracts the subjects of childhood, marriage, and parenthood through chiseled, mythologizing language, such that domestic life becomes elevated into the full lyric complexity it deserves. What an extraordinary collection, every line fueled by a resilient, remarkable heart.' Tender and profound, Hinge's powerful portrait of survival offers us a thing with feathersa hope that flits between rooms, from shadow to light, before settling down to stay. As observer and observed, mother and patient, the poet recounts her constant movement between deep interior darknesses and the thin winter light outside. 'In Hinge, Molly Spencer speaks to us from both sides of a door ajar. These are poems that exquisitely tend to the work of living.' Her poems illuminate what it means to inhabit a body turning on itself, to come to knowledge by loss and by absence. 'Through legend and landscape, in her lush and razor-sharp lines, Molly Spencer's newest collection, Hinge, navigates mothering and the passage of time in the throes of chronic illness. 'After Reading the Story of Assumption Chapel in Cold Spring, Minnesota' July 7, 2020: 'Elegy Beginning with a Text From My Brother' 'As if the snow were a province I'd visited.' Other poems by Molly Spencer in Verse Daily: She teaches writing at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Her critical writing has appeared at Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, The Writer's Chronicle, and The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. Molly's recent poetry has appeared in Blackbird, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. A second collection, Hinge (2020) won the Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph.

Her debut collection, If the House (2019), won the Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, and editor. Today's poem is 'Self-Portrait as The River Floods' Verse Daily: About Hinge by Molly Spencer ®