pace between worlds: one disintegrating, one yet unformed; outside of time, but teeming with the desires time presents. Probing the nature and reliability of language and perception, the contours of human suffering, and the complexities of ordinary love, Invitatory insists that we confront the world, and ourselves in it, and invites us to pledge ourselves to the world as it is and as it might one day be.

What People Are Saying

In this luminous collection, Molly Spencer sets her infrared sight on the interstice between "shelter and glare," that indeterminate spot where elements recombine and the world appears strangely remade - or, even more mysteriously, "found out." Thresholds are frightening places, but Spencer trusts that destabilized ground is exactly where all encounters with "genuine rescue" occur. Undaunted by the ever-slippery nature of language, Spencer tracks words like a bird dog, or guide to the underworld, crafting, in poem after gorgeous poem, the most intimate forms of invitation, that we, too might recognize likeness between self and other, and hold our deepest yearnings with compassion. -Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers

"Wasn't rowing at all, only dipping the blade of my one oar / here, then there, to steer a little," yet or is the oar which sets Molly Spencer's poems pleasingly amok in this masterful collection, Invitatory. Or rather, it's inside the boundaries of the either-or, where Spencer explores breakage (and ruin) as the presage and/or the aftermath of intimacy, of language, of touch, of longing, and (yes) of loss. There is an intriguing muscularity happening here, a kind of muscle memory in which each poem, grafted tendon-like each to each, remembers, foresees, and challenges what happens in the other poems. Rather I should say, more body than just a collection of poems, Invitatory isn't afraid to show its math. Images-well-wrought, evocative, and cinematic the first time-are reconsidered again and again, yet somehow appear sharper, more vivid, more surprising with each iteration. Spencer has created a living thing that is sure to outlive all of us lucky enough to hold it for a while. -Tommye Blount, author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue

About the Author

Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, editor, and writing instructor. Her debut collection, If the House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) won the 2019 Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), won the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. She teaches at the University of Michigan.