Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, and editor. Her debut collection, If the House (2019), won the Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge (2020) won the Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. Molly's recent poetry has appeared in Blackbird, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. 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. She teaches writing at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

Other poems by Molly Spencer in Verse Daily:
July 7, 2020:   "Elegy Beginning with a Text From My Brother" "As if the snow were a province I'd visited..."

Books by Molly Spencer:

Other poems on the web by Molly Spencer:
"After Reading the Story of Assumption Chapel in Cold Spring, Minnesota"
"Even So, the First Bird"
Two poems
Three poems

Molly Spencer's Website.

Molly Spencer on Twitter.

About Hinge:

"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. Her poems illuminate what it means to inhabit a body turning on itself, to come to knowledge by loss and by absence. These are poems that exquisitely tend to the work of living."
—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

"In Hinge, Molly Spencer speaks to us from both sides of a door ajar. As observer and observed, mother and patient, the poet recounts her constant movement between deep interior darknesses and the thin winter light outside. Tender and profound, Hinge's powerful portrait of survival offers us a thing with feathers—a hope that flits between rooms, from shadow to light, before settling down to stay. What an extraordinary collection, every line fueled by a resilient, remarkable heart."
—Jennifer Richter

"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. At the same time, a narrative of illness and autoimmunity cuts across the book, creating a 'wraith' of the speaker that 'flickers, / moonlit, on [medical] screens.' Not only does the language in Hinge feel hard-won in the best sense, but so, too, do its domestic spaces themselves. 'Every day is a creation story,' Spencer tells us in these layered, moving poems, reminding us of the simple fact that our private rooms full of 'metronomic' breathing are, ultimately, where a 'life will happen.'"
—Wayne Miller

"Hinge does not necessarily open easily to its readers, but what it opens onto is a beautiful if sometimes frightening world well worth entering. Molly Spencer's ear is acute, and her eyes are open wide, as she surveys a lifetime riddled (in both senses) by chronic pain (in multiple senses). Surprising and memorable images are everywhere, especially in her recasting of fairy tales and in multipart poems such as 'Patient Years,' 'The Objects of Faith,' and 'First House'—where her hard-won resistance to adversity is captured in lines such as these: 'At some point the cold runs out / of options. The crocus / shoves its dumb face / through wasting scraps of snow.' So much of value hinges upon Hinge."
—Stephen Corey