Acts: Poems
May 2024 · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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128
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About this ebook
A book of poems that reckons with love in all its forms, by the priest and poet Spencer Reece—his first collection in ten years.
. . . My old love,
my love who gave me language that I love,
when there are no words, there are only acts.
Spencer Reece, a poet and an Episcopal priest, suffuses his poetry with tenderness, humanity, and a wonderous alchemy of beauty and sorrow. As the Nobel laureate Louise Glück 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, the third book of poetry by Reece, is the product of a decade of work and of a life acutely lived. In it, he celebrates the language and literature of Spain and tracks his tenure at the Spanish Episcopal Church. At times, the collection is a love letter to Madrid; at other moments, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where the speaker’s parents lived until the death of his father, and to Little Compton, Rhode Island. The poems are also an homage to the letter itself, to its art and its waning means of connection across distance. In Acts, Reece confronts grief and love, loneliness and self-acceptance, with honesty, artful lyricism, and, above all, a true and luminous grace.
. . . My old love,
my love who gave me language that I love,
when there are no words, there are only acts.
Spencer Reece, a poet and an Episcopal priest, suffuses his poetry with tenderness, humanity, and a wonderous alchemy of beauty and sorrow. As the Nobel laureate Louise Glück 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, the third book of poetry by Reece, is the product of a decade of work and of a life acutely lived. In it, he celebrates the language and literature of Spain and tracks his tenure at the Spanish Episcopal Church. At times, the collection is a love letter to Madrid; at other moments, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where the speaker’s parents lived until the death of his father, and to Little Compton, Rhode Island. The poems are also an homage to the letter itself, to its art and its waning means of connection across distance. In Acts, Reece confronts grief and love, loneliness and self-acceptance, with honesty, artful lyricism, and, above all, a true and luminous grace.
About the author
Spencer Reece's first book of poetry, The Clerk ́s Tale, was selected by Louise Glück as winner of the Bakeless Prize and recognized with 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 Prize. Reece has also edited a bilingual anthology of poems by the abandoned girls of Our Little Roses, Counting Time Like People Count Stars; written a poet's memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark; and published a book of watercolors, All the Beauty Still Left. An Episcopal priest, he served in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Madrid; and New York City. He is the vicar of St. Paul’s, Wickford, Rhode Island.
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