Acts: Poems

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The poetry of Spencer Reece, a renowned writer who is also an Episcopal priest, is suffused with tenderness, humanity, and a wondrous alchemy of beauty and sorrow. As the Nobel laureate Louise Glck wrote, "Emanating from Spencer Reece's work [is] a sense of immanence that belongs more commonly to religious passion; it is a great thing to have it again in art." Acts, Reece's third book of poetry, is the product of a decade of work and of a life acutely lived. In these poems, he celebrates the language and literature of Spain and tracks his tenure as a minister there. At times, the collection is a love letter to Madrid; at other moments, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where the speaker's parents lived, and Rhode Island, where he now resides. The poems are also an homage to the letter as an art form, a rich if waning means of connection. In Acts, Reece confronts grief and love, loneliness and self-acceptance, with honesty, artful lyricism, and, above all, a true and luminous grace.

Reviews

"The excellent latest from Reece is immersed in a faithful, but not unquestioning, lyricism, in part inflected by his life as a priest . . . Righteousness and puritanism are the enemy in these pages, and a leavening wit seeks to amplify, and deepen, an erotic of piety . . .These poems are generously companionable hymns of delight in service." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"For Reece, the challenge is to write the words as lovingly as he is supposed to perform the acts the words describe, but which are wordless. The best poems in this collection enact this paradox, which is nowhere near as simple as it sounds." --Michael Autrey, Booklist

". . . when you / become a ghost in one world you become / a guest in another. . ." Spencer Reece writes poems of deep searching--haunted, haunting meditations on what it feels like to be in and out of place. In this book absence and presence are never quite opposites, and a quest for the meanings of home nurtures a lyricism of rare and beautiful combinations: perplexity and wisdom, desirousness and patience, risk and restraint. Acts is-in the full sense of the word--a blessing." --Matthew Bevis, author of Wordsworth's Fun

Author Bio

Spencer Reece's first book of poetry, The Clerk's Tale, received the Bakeless Prize and an award from the Library of Congress. His second collection, The Road to Emmaus, was long-listed for the National Book Award and short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Reece has also edited a bilingual anthology of poems by the children of Our Little Roses Home for Girls in Honduras, Counting Time Like People Count Stars; written a memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark; and published a book of watercolors, All the Beauty Still Left. As an Episcopal priest, he has served in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Madrid; and New York City. He is the vicar of St. Paul's Church in Wickford, Rhode Island.