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• Acts: Poems - 2024 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY
• All the Beauty Still Left: A Poet's Painted Book of Hours (selected and illustrated by Spencer Reece) - 2021 Turtle Point Press, Brooklyn, NY
• The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet's Memoir - 2020 Seven Stories Press, New York, NY

• Wikipedia -

  Spencer Reece

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Spencer Reece is a poet and presbyter who lives in Madrid, Spain. He graduated from Wesleyan University (1985). Reece received his M.A. from the University of York, England, his M.T.S. from the Harvard Divinity School, and a M.Div. from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale Divinity School. At Wesleyan, Spencer took a class in writing verse with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Annie Dillard (Tinker at Pilgrim Creek), whom he describes as "an early encourager," along with James Merrill, the Stonington poet with whom Spencer corresponded.[1]

  His 2004 book, The Clerk's Tale, was published by the Houghton Mifflin Company (A Mariner Original). The Clerk's Tale was the winner of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize and was judged by former U.S. poet laureate Louise Glück. The title poem describes a day in the life at a store in the Mall of America. Reece worked for many years as a sales associate at Brooks Brothers in the Mall. James Franco based his short film on the title poem.[2] Reece's second book, The Road to Emmaus, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in April 2014. His work has appeared in Boulevard, The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review.[3] The Road to Emmaus was a long list nominee for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Griffin Prize in Canada.

  2017 saw the publication of Counting Time like People Count Stars: Poems by the Girls of Little Roses, San Pedro Sula, Honduras (Tia Chucha Press).[4] This anthology of poems in Spanish with English translations was edited by Reece. The project was born from his time teaching at the Orphanage of Our Little Roses in Honduras.[5]

  In 2019, Common Prayer: Reflections on Episcopal Worship was published, containing a chapter by Reece.

  In 2022, Seven Stories Press published The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet's Memoir. A collection of watercolors was also published that year, All The Beauty Still Left: A Poet's Painted Book of Hours by Turtle Point Press. In 2024, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish his third collection of poems, Acts.

  Reece was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in 2011.[6] He served as priest at the Spanish Episcopal Church for ten years. From 2020 to 2022, he served as the interim priest at Saint Mark's/San Marcos in Jackson Heights, Queens, a bilingual parish that lost their priest from the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2023, he became the vicar of Saint Paul's, in Wickford, Rhode Island, serving the Bishop of Rhode Island.

  Awards
  American academy of arts and letters award in literature, 2016

  Shortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize for The Road to Emmaus
  Longlist nominee for National Book 2014 for The Road to Emmaus
  Recipient of the Witter Bynner Prize administered by the Library of Congress.[2]
  Recipient of the Pushcart Prize in 2009.
  Recipient of a Whiting Award in 2005 for poetry.
  Winner of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize for 2004.
  Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
  Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship.
  Recipient of an Amy Lowell Traveling Grant.

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/spencer-reece

  Spencer Reece
  B. 1963

  Share
  Headshot of Spencer Reece
  Photo courtesy of the poet
  Born in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in Minneapolis, poet Spencer Reece is the son of a pathologist and a nurse. He earned a BA at Wesleyan University, an MA at the University of York, an MTS at Harvard Divinity School, and an MDiv at Yale Divinity School. He was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 2011. Reece’s debut collection of poetry, The Clerk’s Tale (2004), was chosen for the Bakeless Poetry Prize by Louise Glück and adapted into a short film by director James Franco. He is also the author of the collection The Road to Emmaus (2013), which was a longlist nominee for the National Book Award. Reece is also the author of a memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark (2021).

  Reece’s poems explore faith and family, paying attention to the fragility of each. Though he wrote in relative isolation for two decades before his first book was published, Reece received early encouragement from writer Annie Dillard and poet James Merrill. In a statement for the Poetry Society of America, Reece discussed the inspirational role T.S. Eliot has played in his work: “I often ponder Eliot's spiritual journey,” Reece noted. “When I try to write, his example is never far from my mind. At times, I'd like to think I am in conversation with him.” Reece’s own work has been compared to that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, particularly by poet Henri Cole, who observed that Reece “is a formal poet, but his form is not bloodlessly perfect. He is unafraid of smudging things to get us closer to the truth.”

  His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, grants from the Fulbright Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Council, a Witter Bynner fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

  Reece has been a chaplain to Bishop Carlos Lopez-Lozano of the Reformed Episcopal Church in Spain, and was awarded a Fulbright grant to work on a collaborative writing project with children at an orphanage in Honduras in 2012-2013. He lives in Connecticut.

• Academy of American Poets - https://poets.org/poet/spencer-reece

  Spencer Reece is the author of Acts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024); The Road to Emmaus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), long-listed for the National Book Award and short-listed for the Griffin Prize; and The Clerk’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2004), which was both selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Bakeless Prize and recognized with an award from the Library of Congress.

  Reece has also published a book of watercolors, All The Beauty Still Left: A Poet’s Painted Hours (Turtle Point Press, 2021), and written a memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir (Seven Stories Press, 2021). He has also edited a bilingual anthology of poems by the abandoned girls of Our Little Roses, titled Counting Time Like People Count Stars: Poems by the Girls of Our Little Roses, San Pedro Sula, Honduras (Tia Chucha, 2017),

  As an Episcopalian priest, Reece has served in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Madrid, Spain; and New York, New York. He is currently the vicar of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island.

• Spencer Reece website - https://www.spencerreece.org/

  Biography
  In 2003, Reece authored The Clerk's Tale, selected by Louise Glück, awarded the Bakeless Prize, recognized with an award from the Library of Congress. In 2014, The Road to Emmaus was published, long-listed for the National Book Award, short-listed for the Griffin
  Prize. In 2017, Reece edited a bilingual anthology of poems by the abandoned girls of Our Little Roses, Counting Time Like People Count Stars. The work was featured in an award-winning documentary film, Voices Beyond the Wall: 12 Love Poems from the Murder Capital of the World. In 2021, two new works appeared, nonfiction and watercolors — The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir and All The Beauty Still Left: A Poet’s Painted Book of Hours. An Episciopal priest, he served in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Madrid, Spain; New York City, New York. He is the vicar of St. Paul’s, Wickford, Rhode Island. More than a decade in the making, Acts is his long-awaited third collection of poems.

• Porter House Review - https://porterhousereview.org/articles/a-conversation-with-spencer-reece/

  A Conversation with Spencer Reece
  Book cover of 'The Secret Gospel of Mark'
  Apr 07 ● BY Tom Grimes

  Poet Spencer Reece earned a BA at Wesleyan University, an MA at the University of York, an MTS at Harvard Divinity School, and a Master’s degree at Yale Divinity School. He was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 2011. Reece’s debut collection of poetry, The Clerk’s Tale (2004), was chosen for the Poetry Prize by Louise Glück and adapted into a short film by director James Franco. His second collection, The Road to Emmaus (2013), was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Griffin Prize, the most world’s most prestigious poetry award.

  His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Witter Bynner fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and a Whiting Writers’ Award. Reece won a Fulbright grant to work on a collaborative poetry project with children at a girl’s orphanage in Honduras in 2012-2013. His experience is the subject of the documentary Voices Beyond the Wall: Orphan Poets of Honduras. His memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark, was published on March 16th, 2021. He worked on it for seventeen years.

  Tom Grimes: Given that your poetry collections have appeared a decade apart, that your new collection will be published by Farrar, Strass & Giroux in 2024, and that you worked on your memoir for seventeen years, could you first talk about your eagerness, as a young man, to be published, your anxiety about perhaps never being published, and why you persisted despite your early work being rejected three-hundred times? Also, how has patience effected your writing life?

  Spencer Reece: Patience was foisted upon me. When young I definitely wanted the poems published early. But—what else to attribute it to? — God was good, the poetry gods were good, if that is more palatable to the agonistic reader, because had the book been published when I wanted it, say at age 25, it would have been premature, the work not fully-formed. Mercy and grace have surrounded my creative efforts, that is what I can see now with hindsight: hindsight being one of the truest gifts of age. Publishing somewhat later taught me something, or the delay somehow molded me, and little did I realize such a long pause would shape what I would do going forward. It’s not so premeditated, now, at close to sixty as a writer: I just see I don’t get to my truths quickly. That seems to be the point: telling the truth in the art. That’s what I am after, in poems or prose. And time must somehow be dilated or pass before I can understand much of anything. Writing for me is a combination of lightning-like inspirations followed by a hell of a lot of drafts, rooms full of drafts.

  Grimes: Your first poetry wasn’t published until you were forty-one, while you were working in Brooks Brothers in West Palm Beach, Florida. How did publication change your life?

  Reece: I went from unknown and anonymous to known. Granted it was poetry, but still. I was a clerk one week and at the Library of Congress and in The New York Times the following. This is part of the grace and mercy aspect of my tale, because I was forty-one, I was more humbled by time, so the events were certainly startling, exciting, thrilling, charged with joy, but I stayed my course. I stayed at Brooks five more years! And then, slowly, in that time, I meditated, met with spiritual advisors, and felt called to the Episcopal priesthood, a business I had started long ago in my twenties. I circled back. Poetry made that possible. Amazing really.

  Grimes: Poets are major figures in your life, of course, and you’ve structured your memoir around your reading of and the importance of seven poets in it? Why did you choose these specific poets?

  Reece: I just sat down one day and thought about my life and the poets that entered it at the time they did. The book needed to work organically so that the material contrapuntally married up to what was happening in my life. Plath was just incredible: the leaps. She was a genius. And the biography riveted me at a time when I had my own deep depression and rage. And you had to say her Ariel poems, which she said herself before she died, her poetry had a charm that brought poetry alive to me.

  Bishop was different. Her Yankee reserve, her hidden alcoholism and lesbianism fascinated me, her emphasis on travel and moving all around which proved prophetic because I too have moved all around! We both loved Florida and we both lived abroad a lot. Herbert sounded so clear to me, so modern for the 17th Century, I still can’t get over how relevant he sounds, reading him is like drinking clear mountain water. Merrill was the first famous poet I met and that was thrilling. I liked too his wide embrace of forms. And of course, he was gay, I knew that, even though I think we still weren’t saying it so offhandedly like now, and I needed to hear and see that sound to figure out how to survive. Dickinson is a genius, and her leaps of mind are incredible. And the fact she did it all alone is astonishing. Her compression and timing are intoxicating. Hopkins? Well, he just made up his own language and sound and he was also a priest. He was so isolated. Also, when I read him, I realized the gratitude I had for being a gay man and a priest now. He suffered so.

  The last chapter of my book falls under the heading of the title “Follow Me” from Jesus, and shows our speaker, a poet who is now a priest, moving through the world as an ordained clergy and still mad about poetry. I wanted to hold up my colleagues in this art: Richard Blanco, Greg Pardlo, Luis Munoz – all living poets, all from diverse backgrounds, and all I’ve learned from them. Interwoven between those encounters is meeting Mark Strand for the last time before he died, founding a literary festival in Madrid, and producing a bilingual anthology by the abandoned girls in Honduras, which then became a filmed documentary. So, the final chapter is like the flower of me finally blooming.

  Grimes: You came to know poets James Merrill and Mark Strand. With Merrill, you were much younger and unpublished, with Strand you were older and published. How did it feel to have a relationship with living poets?

  Reece: With Merrill I think, honestly, I was fairly quiet, timid, eager to please. He was generous, kind. I’ve just realized what you’ve pointed out, (you think I would have noticed), that Strand serves as a kind of foil, shows me aging. With Strand I felt more like we were members of this big family. Merrill introduced me to that idea. With Strand it was so poignant. With both men they knew they were dying but with Merrill I didn’t know because he kept it a secret and there was shame with AIDS. With Strand we knew he was dying, that the cancer cure wasn’t working, so I just tried to be there with him, and he wanted to be with me, and both men were just kind, kind, kind to me. Probably like fathers, which is something I’ve often sought out. Or did for a very long time. Now I’m the father and I am finding myself encouraging a raft of young poets. It feels right, balanced.

  Grimes: Your next collection has a different ‘sound’ from your previous collection, just as that collection had a different ‘sound’ from your first collection. Why is finding a new ’sound’ the key to your writing each new collection?

  Reece: Well, I think Louise Glück really emphasized that with me. I’m not sure I would have gone that way without her counsel. Probably not. She just said after The Clerk’s Tale, “You can do the same thing again, it’s fine, or wait for a new sound.” That did it. And it wasn’t easy, but that’s part of art, a lot of hard work. I loved that she broke herself apart and made new books. I loved Averno, which lots of people don’t care for, it’s so prosy, but you can see there she has radically altered her aesthetic, and this opened the door to new directions, new surprises, like The Village Life, one of my favorites of hers, the sort of response to confessionalism we’d been waiting for. Like Picasso, Glück has been, I suppose. I wanted that.

  Acts, which will be published in 2024, is wildly different from The Road to Emmaus and from The Clerk’s Tale. I think if the first book catalogued damage, and the second forgiveness, Acts is about love. Love and all its messiness. Of course, with me, some things repeat. I unconsciously write about older father figures from my work life! I remember hearing Donna Tart give a talk after The Goldfinch and someone asked why she always wrote about orphans. “I don’t know,” she said, like a sphinx with her page-boy boy and French-knotted tie and suit. Acts is also about Spanish and English and it’s about Spain and being a priest.

  Grimes: You’re now a priest, but you first identified as a poet. How do these seemingly different identities now form an integrated whole? Can you imagine yourself being one and not the other?

  Reece: Yes. I’ve been a priest ten years. I learn more every day. There’s a lot to learn. In my life, I’ve had a vocation that identified me to the world one way, and the art was always something, has always been something, so far, going on in the background. The two push against each other. The world sees me one way – priest – or salesman – or store assistant manager – while at home the poems get written or thought about while doing the dishes. I’ve tried teaching some, a little goes a long way. The priest part is very out there in the world – baptisms, weddings, funerals. Poetry for the most part, writing, as you know, is a loner’s game, hours and hours. Occasionally there’s “the reading” which is so different from the making of the art it sometimes shocks poets. But that’s part of it, sharing what you’ve done. But on the whole it’s isolated. I need both things and treasure both things and am grateful to have both things so very much.

  Grimes: For several years, you worked in Madrid as a bishop’s assistant. That’s where you began to write your memoir. You wondered whether your book would be a ‘memoir-breviary,’ or a ‘poetry devotional’? Do you believe that your memoir is either of these self-invented forms, and that writing it allowed you to fully accept your sexuality?

  Reece: I began writing the memoir actually further back than that, in 2003, when The Clerk’s Tale won the Bakeless Prize. As I say in the book, the press portrayed me as coming out of a vacuum and that was partly true, but the part I wanted documented was that many, living and dead, had made the whole of me. I do wonder what this fat book is, The Secret Gospel of Mark. It’s the size of a brick. I love the paper-overboard. I love the smell of the paper. It is not a straight memoir, no pun intended, because it also metabolizes so much poetry, but the poetry analysis isn’t to the pitch of Helen Vendler (whom I adore), it’s more, well, religious, I suppose. I love the word “devotional,” so when I frequently read from the 139 chapters I say, “Devotion 7,” et cetera…. It’s some kind of book I could never find anywhere. I thought I might be of some use by adding these thoughts to the shelf. And yes, I think it has, in the end, helped me, at 57, accept my sexuality more fully. That, for whatever reason, and I’m not sure what the reason is anymore – my generation, my genetic make-up, my disposition, the world – took a very long time – like my poems, I guess.

  Grimes: How does it feel to be back in the States, working as a priest in Jackson Heights, Queens (and walking past the building in which I went to high school and ran track)?

  Reece: I love Jackson Heights, to tell you the truth. I love the six-story size of the place; it’s like Madrid that way. I love La Guardia nearby. I love New Yorkers. They scream and love like Madrileños. I’m sort of the opposite of that, but I love my opposites. The other day in the sacristy the clergy and lay people were screaming about whether or not to have an Easter egg hunt. The contrast between the topic and the heated delivery was so – well – so charmingly New York City, specifically Queens, the laughed-at borough. I’m glad to be here. Proud to be here.

  Definitely God sent me. I have replaced a beloved priest that died of COVID, which feels sacred. We’re helping everyone express their grief. I don’t know where my life goes. I never have. I didn’t know when I visited you in Texas, which was spectacular. I’ve signed a contract to work in this parish for three years. I’ll be sixty when my third collection Acts comes out. Now I’m off to Zoom bible study. I’ve got my first vaccination shot. What a strange and wild time we’ve gone through. I’m glad to greet the seeming end of this pandemic with The Secret Gospel of Mark: its timing feels right.

• The Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/03/16/poems-are-spiritual-suitcases-an-interview-with-spencer-reece/

  Poems Are Spiritual Suitcases: An Interview with Spencer Reece
  By Jonathan Farmer March 16, 2021At Work

  Photo: Pete Duval.

  Spencer Reece’s memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark, feels like what it is—a product of remarkable time and care. It took Reece seventeen years to write the book, and however much he wanted it to be done earlier, he kept waiting for and working toward a rightness that eluded him. I can’t remember anymore how I stumbled into that process. I’d occasionally written to him over the years to tell him how much I admire his poems and to share what I’d written about them, and somehow, at some point, that resulted in him sending me a draft of the book.

  By then, Reece had already discovered the structure he credits with unlocking the book—one in which he defines and shapes each part of his life through the life and work of a poet who was important to him at that time. But he still wanted help, which, as Reece presents it, is one of the defining features of his life. For all of the ways in which he once struggled to make a life for himself outside of—and then, eventually, inside—the social structures that refused him and his queerness, he has also inspired a remarkable number of people to help and shelter him. Just as salient, though, is the abundance Reece offers those who enter his life. Little communities pop up around him like mushrooms. Working through edits and revisions with him felt like being admitted into a sacred space.

  Sacredness is fundamental to the story Reece tells. After years of suffering from alcoholism and rebuilding himself in recovery, unable to find the literary recognition he longed for, and confined by self-loathing, Reece in short order found himself singled out for publication by Louise Glück and the subject of attention from publications like the New York Times—whose profile spurred him to begin working on the memoir, hoping to correct for the sense that he had worked and lived in isolation, without help or love. He then began his journey toward the priesthood. In his telling, poetry and Christianity seem inextricable, which is also the case in his writing, where his audible love of accuracy abides in an equally audible humility—a willingness to move in mystery and honor the sometimes-slow-to-manifest potential for beauty and love.

  For all Reece’s patience, though, he isn’t still. Since 2004, he has published two books of poems—The Clerk’s Tale and The Road to Emmaus—and a third, Acts, is due out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2024. He edited an anthology of poems from Our Little Roses Home for Girls in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where he taught for two years, and he founded and ran the Unamuno Author Series during his years as a priest in Madrid. He now leads a church in Jackson Heights, Queens. The Secret Gospel of Mark has just been published, and All the Beauty Still Left—a collection of his watercolors combined with quotations into a small, tender book of hours—comes out next month.

  We discussed his memoir through a flurry of emails over two days in January, as hatred and disease continued to flare up all around us.

  INTERVIEWER

  The Secret Gospel of Mark is doing a lot of things—it’s a writer’s memoir, a book of religious devotion, a record of the lives of poets you’ve cherished, a portrait of your parents’ complicated love, a story of healing into queerness and of the wounds that preceded it, a narrative of addiction and recovery, and quite a bit more—and yet it all feels unified. In the book, you describe the moment of its inception seventeen years earlier, a need to fill in a story that “talked about how I had jettisoned out of oblivion,” and a desire to recognize all the people who had shepherded you. How did you get from that original impulse to an understanding of how all these elements could work together?

  REECE

  I’m a slow creator—I’ve begun to think I’m on the Bishop plan, or equally the Larkin plan, of about a thing every decade, or a thing every two decades. This prose took a long arc of seventeen to eighteen years from that first impulse to what went to print. I don’t plan for this to happen—I just can’t seem to pull it all together quickly. Some inspirations come quick, surely, but the final product, no. Regarding the emotions, I’m notorious among those who know me best for not understanding something in real time, and only in hindsight can I seem to sort something out. Maybe that’s why I’ve turned to poetry, as a way to make sense of real time.

  I am a poet. I walk, talk, and think like one. I think I finally accept that. I ended up writing a prose book dedicated to poetry. What “unified” it, to use your word, took a long time to see and was actually something very simple. Structure unified the book. My goal was to take all this complexity and make it a fluid read. While what I was attempting was complicated, I wanted it not to read as “complicated,” maybe like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. When you explain that book, it gets complicated, but it doesn’t feel that way when you read it. You flow right along with all those references. The structure of my book came when I assigned poets to periods of my life—Plath and my early life, Herbert and my first turn to faith, et cetera. The poets needed to enter the narrative organically, which meant I needed to think back to when the poets entered my life and recall what was happening then. The whole thing kind of fell into place after that, which happened about seven years ago. Then there were seven more years of editing and honing. The final chapter is a swirl of contemporary poetry, poets in real time, friends, along with the decline of my mother’s health. But only in the last year of editing did I see the figure under which these things swirled—Jesus. Thus the final chapter is called “Follow me” and concerns my past ten years as an ordained man. So it goes!

  INTERVIEWER

  Your prose actually reminds me of your poems. There’s an audible quality of patience, as if given enough time—say, seventeen years!—the shape of things will become apparent, and in the meantime, it’s possible to abide in mystery without loneliness. I tend to hear an element of religious faith in that way of writing, even though it goes at least as far back as your first book of poems, which you wrote when your faith was apparently less consistent and clear. Is that part of your experience, or am I just imposing that from without, as a nonbeliever?

  REECE

  It’s odd. Often in life, earlier life, I have had little patience with many things—falling in love, searching for an apartment, finding a job. But very little has come to me quickly. Patience came to me through waiting, through life. The first book, if I can dig back to my state of mind at the time, I really wanted published much sooner. But it kept getting turned down and passed over. That went on for fifteen years! Roughly three hundred rejections, as a poetry enthusiast once counted for me. I was humbled by that. Was it faith? Was it tenacity? Was it stubbornness? It taught me something, all those rejections. Apparently, once that book was in the world, I didn’t forget that experience. The second book of poems did not come to me for eleven years more. I will be sixty by the time my third book of poems, Acts, is bound—another ten years. Between The Road to Emmaus and Acts I have produced one anthology, been heavily involved with another, founded a literary series, helped produce a festival, been involved in a documentary about poetry, helped establish a chapbook prize for Latinx poetry, and now published this poet’s memoir in addition to my book of watercolors. It’s been a rich decade that way. There’s been joy in that, which might be close to faith, and the joy of the past decade has been sharing gifts God gave me. You are asking about faith specifically, though, and I am not answering that. I am not answering it because mainly, like writing or painting, I find it all mysterious. I find it, ironically, beyond words. No doubt this poet’s memoir must get as close to my thoughts about faith as anything I’ve ever tried to express. It was a challenge! Waiting is probably tied up in faith. I mean, the Bible is simply full of waiting, isn’t it? Everyone in there is waiting around—everyone.

  INTERVIEWER

  You say that you were ready to quit writing before Louise Glück picked your first book for the Bakeless Prize. Do you think you could have actually quit writing? Might you have quit sooner had it not been for the validation of people like James Merrill?

  REECE

  After three hundred rejections, I remember saying to myself in Florida, I would stop entering contests. If I continued to write, it would be just for me, for my own entertainment, which I suppose is a good foundation for all writing regardless of publication. I did feel beaten down, I have to say, and maybe in that thinking, I wondered what it would be like if I just stopped. I thought the contests were rigged. Or I thought you had to know somebody, and I didn’t. I thought you had to have an M.F.A. to know the people to get books published, and I didn’t have that either. The politics of getting a book into the world seemed beyond my scope completely, and so I vowed to devote myself to retail management. That’s when everything changed. Merrill had been dead ten years at that moment. I hung on to his letters and encouragement, but I wasn’t sure he cared for what I wrote. I supposed I would go down the Emily Dickinson chute. How many others have gone down that chute? Discouraged, turned away from the prize of publication and embrace? I think that’s why those thoughts felt so charged falling under the chapter about her. It is a deeply joyful art, and making the art is the goal. But my experience perhaps led to the past ten years of bringing others into the light and celebrating them, because in the end poetry is so democratic. Abandoned girls in Honduras and young Spanish students in Madrid all have access to it. You never know whose life might be changed, as mine has been.

  INTERVIEWER

  This book honors the people who shepherded you, but your descriptions of them are strikingly candid and often unflattering—even as they are unmistakably loving. You write that accuracy is the most important thing for you. Do you feel any tension between accuracy and love, or are those qualities essentially aligned for you?

  REECE

  I suppose they are aligned. If writing isn’t telling the truth, what good is it? Love according to Jesus is a commandment, not a suggestion. And love has got to grow out of some truth. Otherwise, what is it? There are many kinds of love and many kinds of truth. It’s the Keats idea that truth is beauty and that is all we need to know.

  INTERVIEWER

  There are so many beautiful sentences in The Secret Gospel of Mark. You write, “Hopkins’ loneliness comforts my mind.” I think that gets at one of the paradoxes of art—its ability to both render something accurately and give it a separate, even contradictory life. One of the surprises and pleasures of this book is how mobile poems become, the ways in which they echo in your experiences. I feel like we’re often taught not to do that, that we’re encouraged to keep art stationary, to see a given creation only within its own perimeters. Can you say a little about what you think poems are for—and why recording the entrance of poems and poets into your life helped you tell your story?

  REECE

  As the writing went on, as I kept in the forefront of my mind this impulse to honor those that had helped me, I realized that poetry had really consoled me—saved me, to risk sounding evangelical. I don’t know what others do. Listen to Janis Joplin maybe. Or long-distance running. Or who knows what. Go to church. I’ve done all those! But poetry was always the core for me. I never really understood why I was so compelled by poetry so early on. There was some kind of sound being made that connected to me. Poems are freedom. They’re invisibleness. I really understood that in Honduras when the girls started memorizing Shakespeare and Auden and everything else—that these words coming out of their mouths were charms, that they could take the memorized poems with them wherever they went. Poems are spiritual suitcases. Poems comfort in the hour of need. They have comforted me. Plath when I had such inexplicable anger. Bishop when I wondered how I would manage this world. Herbert when I began to want to know more about prayer. Merrill when I wanted to see how to be me, whatever that was. Dickinson in all those years of isolation and then beyond them. Hopkins when I decided for the second time to be a priest and still wondered if I was too outside the fold. And in the final chapter, Strand, Blanco, Pardlo, Munoz swirling together as I began to navigate life as an ordained man—what did it mean to be among contemporaries in the art as one who was following Jesus? Where would I go?

  INTERVIEWER

  You seem to be drawn to likeness. There are so many similes here, and they’re often playful. For instance, at one point you write, “The muddy stream and lake the campus encompassed were overpopulated with ducks and their excrement, their loose anuses going off like firecrackers.” Another sentence goes, “They took to my parents and were as decorous as airline pilots.” But the similes also seem to register other parts of your sensibility—the desire for belonging, the apparent belief that if you lay things alongside each other with enough care, they’ll show you something profound. Is play, is humor, important to you when you write?

  REECE

  Similes and metaphors are always multiplying in my mind. I’m not sure when or how that started. Was it seeing Humpty Dumpty, an egg turned into a bachelor with a bow tie? It probably started somewhere around there. I was a kid who lived in fantasy for years. I didn’t even understand I was doing that, and my parents didn’t discourage it—made-up people, villages, towns, maps, languages. All that spilled into poetry by high school. My father was also a very funny man, and his mother was equally funny. I think I inherited my humor from them. My grandmother was part Cherokee, everyone said, and she was a great bowler and a chain-smoker, and she drank an awful lot, and she died when I was six. She was just sixty, which seems young to me now! But I still remember that she made everyone laugh. She was subtle, sly, downtrodden in a loveless marriage, but the humor carried her. I suppose that formed a part of me.

  INTERVIEWER

  I wonder how all of that—but especially the first part—works with your hunger for accuracy.

  REECE

  Well, so much of what we see we don’t understand. The universe, for example, all the stars, what lies beyond the universe. We really know little. And with regards to one another, how much do we ever really fully know a person, even those close to us? So accuracy is often a guess. All I can say is that I ask myself a hundred times over, Is this accurate? Is this the truth? If the writing strays from that, it must go. Were the duck anuses really like firecrackers? Roger and Dan like airline pilots? Yes and yes. So maybe metaphor and simile expand the reality and possibility of things. The metaphors and similes are often about surprise—whatever is being connected is not expected—and I think surprise is what I treasure most in art.

  INTERVIEWER

  I have one last question. Putting aside sales and recognition and all those things, what do you hope this book might do when it heads out into the world?

  REECE

  I’ve never had lower expectations than I have now. Which is not to be confused with the fact that I feel a great sense of accomplishment and peace. I gave the book my all, but I honestly don’t know what to say. I know it’s the truth. It’s a gospel—which as you know breaks down to “God spell” in Anglo-Saxon. Maybe it’s cast a spell of some sort, some sort of release. The thing about making something as a writer, if you’ve done it right, is that you learn—the book has taught you something rather than the other way around. You think you are telling the book what it will be, but if you’ve done it right, it will end up telling you what it is. And now I’ll take what I’ve learned and go away for a while longer.

  Jonathan Farmer is the author of That Peculiar Affirmative: On the Social Life of Poems and the editor in chief and poetry editor of At Length. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches middle and high school English.

• The Adroit Journal - https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-fifty-five/a-conversation-with-spencer-reece/

  A Conversation with Spencer Reece
  BY KIMBERLY GREY

  In May of 2025, Spencer Reece won the prestigious John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his significant contribution to American literature, given to an artist for their entire body of work, alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda, Don DeLillo, Angela Davis, and Marie Howe. Reece is the rector of the historic St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island. Love IV: Collected Poems will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the fall of 2030. His poetry appeared this past April in The New Yorker.

  ***

  In the fall of 2016, I sat with Spencer Reece for many slow, lingering meals under a pergola stitched with ivy at Civitella Ranieri, an artist colony nestled in the hills of Umbria, Italy. The air was warm with late light, the table always set with bread, fruit, and the kind of quiet utterances that invites conversation to stretch itself out. I had come to Civitella as an emerging writer. Reece, in my eyes, was fully emerged—a poet of astonishing range and presence, capacious with life and poetic wisdom. Every conversation with him, whether about poetry, faith, hardship, or joy, felt like an education in how to live as much as how to write.

  Reece has been one of my great teachers, though I found him not in a classroom but in the living world. His wisdom is hard-won and deeply lived: shaped by years working as a store clerk at Brooks Brothers in Florida, teaching at an orphanage in Honduras, and later serving as secretary to a bishop in Madrid. His experiences remind us that it is not the cloistered act of writing alone, but the continual action of life and service, that begets poetry—and that poetry itself requires constant acts of faith. It was an honor to sit with him and talk about his tremendous collection Acts, published last year by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

  Kimberly Grey: Let’s begin where we met: beautiful Civitella. What do you remember most about your experience there? Did you have a writing schedule or ritual you adhered to? I know you were working on The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir, because I remember sitting on the couch in your studio as you read excerpts to me. Were you also writing the poems that would find their way into Acts? Did the writing of that memoir inform the writing of Acts in any way?

  Spencer Reece: I was invited to Civitella in 2016, almost ten years ago. I lived in Madrid, Spain, then, working for the Episcopal bishop of Spain. The bishop allowed me to take a six-week leave to attend Civitella. I went in the fall where I met you in that fifteenth-century castle given to the world by Ursula Corning. God bless Ursula. I was in the room where Mark Strand had once been. The first three days there, with the Umbrian umber and gold landscape, I slept. I slept for ten hour stretches. My work with the bishop had exhausted me more than I knew. Then I began my work. An editor at Granta magazine, Luke Niema, from London, encouraged me to work on The Secret Gospel of Mark. The kernel of that book began as a memory of James Merrill that Luke Niema had solicited. The poet’s memoir, a prose book on how poetry saved my life, was a seventeen-year project. With my peripatetic life as a priest, prose sets a different challenge than poetry. Poems seem to roll around in my head and I pick them up and put them down as the decades pass. But with the prose I needed sustained attention, especially that book: I needed to remember and retain what happened on page 9 when I was on page 299. Civitella allowed me to think through the whole project without interruptions. I woke early with the sun, ate breakfast, worked until the late afternoon, then reread what I’d done, every day for six weeks. I’ve never had such a sustained period of work with writing before or since. More drafts followed after Civitella, but that room on the second floor and the meals prepared for us got me closer. I don’t think I worked on poems then. No time.

  Writing the memoir did affect my life. The memoir increased my gratitude for all the people and poems and poets that helped me. Acts, the poems that followed the memoir, written over ten years or so, winnow my sound with more clarity. I craved the lyric after having wrestled so many sentences to the mat. The Road to Emmaus was prosy. It had prose poems! The Book of Acts in the Bible follows the Gospels. Taking my cue from that ordering, I was concerned with what happens in real time after the Gospels when I wrote Acts. How does the spirit spread in front of my face as a priest? The Gospel had to come before I could bring that into the world, I suppose. I was working the line between the past and the present with these two projects. In the writing of the memoir, finally, I did not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. Topics of how alcoholism had affected those I loved most and coming into a greater peace with being me, all this I think, I can now see, were clarified for me as I wrote the memoir, which was a self-portrait in the nude: that affected the poems. And once done, it doesn’t need to be done again.

  Louise Glück, whom I miss, was passionate and greedy in telling us to use whatever materials were possible to make our poems. I felt that way with the memoir; it was affecting the new sound I was making in the poems. Curious isn’t it that when I finally set out to write a book of prose, a memoir, in my late fifties, that the thing became entirely about poetry? “I’m mad for poetry,” I thought when the seventeen years were finished. Why, Kimmy, who’s to say? It is the art I love most. The Secret Gospel of Mark was my autobiography told through the poets and their poems that saved my life, and Acts was concerned with the autobiography of the Holy Spirit. The Secret Gospel of Mark came out in the pandemic, and I have given only one public reading from it in person, at Bennington, years after the publication date. The book came out quietly: apparently, that was the way that book was meant to enter the world. That quiet entrance informs me and pleases me, strangely.

  KG: Can you tell us more about the process of writing Acts? Where and how does a book begin for you?

  SR: I have written a book of poetry every decade since forty. That has not been on purpose, but more organic. The first book took twenty years, and I often wondered, while writing it, if my work would ever be seen by a public. I suppose that made me cautious. Or perhaps it made me patient: I had often been impatient. Poetry, and publishing it, taught me a great patience. I write quickly. I write slowly. An idea comes to me, and if the idea or the tune persists, I start writing it down. I frequently go through hundreds of drafts. I’ve only written one poem in my work that came quickly and required only a few drafts. That poem from my first book is called “Autumn Song.” I mainly wrote Acts on the office computer when the bishop was traveling, and I was in the office alone for the day. Although I never told him this, I am certain he had suspicions. Curiously, I always meditate on a visual artist and their work like some kind of icon throughout the decade that I write a book: the image is usually somewhere in the notebook where I collect the poems. The Clerk’s Tale was John Singer Sargent. The Road to Emmaus was Diane Arbus. Acts was Diego Velasquez. I am always trying to make a new sound with each book, a sound that I haven’t heard, that surprises me.

  KG: To turn more deeply toward Acts, one of the early poems in the book, “Letters from Spain,” unfolds as a long poem in multiple sections, documenting one’s time living and working for a bishop in Madrid. In “Navidad,” the speakers tell us, “This city [is] where poetry died.” Tell us about Madrid and Madrid’s history and its influence on this book and your poetics.

  SR: I wound up in Madrid as a kind of wild accident: I was invited for a year after I was ordained on the Amy Lowell traveling grant and ended up staying for a decade! The city, the country, changed my aesthetic entirely. A new language—grammar, vocabulary, expressions—entered my brain in my forties and scrambled the way I thought about everything. It is humbling to acquire language at forty-five. Humbler still to be speaking it in public every weekend under the guise of providing spiritual support to many. I managed. Gradually through classes, films, books, the whole place began to cure in my brain. The Civil War seemed to largely remain just under the service of most conversations. I began to read the Civil War poets and that changed my poetics. Lorca and Machado are gorgeous. Sarah Arvio has brilliantly translated Lorca. I can’t ever repay how much that country gave to me from the soles of my feet to the top of my head.

  KG: Those two figures, Federico García Lorca and Antonio Machado, occur repeatedly in these poems, the former of whom was assassinated by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War for being both socialist and queer. Talk to us about their influence on you as a poet. How would you describe yourself as connected to and/or in conversation with them aesthetically, politically, spiritually?

  SR: Well, while I lived there, working long hours as the secretary to the bishop, an author series erupted in my off hours and among the many writers and personalities I met and celebrated there, including you. I met, one day, Laura García Lorca, the niece of Lorca, and meeting her was like meeting all of Spain, the sorrow and the injustice and the passion and the elegance seemed contained in this beautiful woman. I liked her very much and that affected me. Lorca was a genius; the poems contain all different registers. His queerness I probably gravitate to without even knowing why, much the way I read Frank O’Hara and Elizabeth Bishop in college and I felt like they were talking to me. Machado for me writes exquisitely of longing and there is a measured patience about his words which I associate with Spain. When I visited his house in Segovia, the rooms spoke to me. Spain taught me to live and to love in ways that were different to me as an American. And these poets, all run over by a dictatorship, were waiting for me in the cracks, in the books, in the air, when I arrived as a brand new priest in a foreign country. I felt them with me all the time. Still do.

  KG: The epistolary form is a large part of the speaker’s thinking. We are told that, “Letters started in the Book of Acts . . . a biography of the Holy Spirit.” Early in the book, the Palacio de Cibeles is described as a, “grand post office / [that] is now a museum. The letter slots sealed?” How has the epistle form influenced your poetry or vice-versa? Do you see letters as having different kinds of conversations than poems? A way of tracking biography? A dying art?

  SR: Yes. Letters and the writing of letters are largely gone now from the culture. The way we used to write them. When I was in college with my manual typewriter, I would send out two or three a week. Letters made a certain intimate sound that texting or emails do not. They were slower, more circumspect, letters moved us through our lives in a slower and perhaps more meticulous manner. They had a smell to them. Marie Howe captures this in one of her poems. I wanted this book, one last time, for me, to recall that lovely way we had of communicating. I don’t write letters anymore, I thought, in Madrid, noticing how the post office was turned into a museum and moved to a smaller basement location. My book of poetry will be my letter, I thought. The New Testament, as you know, is largely made of letters, and it begins with Acts, so the title of the book is signaling the letter. Letters were spontaneous and they tracked time. The book is a love letter to Spain, and a love letter to my parents by the end, as I was finishing the book and turning towards the care of my aging parents: my father’s death and my mother’s abrupt diminishment with a massive stroke.

  KG: In the section “El año siguiente” you write, “Biblical texts that discount sex are of no use / in a city that excels at the art of the guess.” In addition, there are other references of homophobia the speaker encounters during an AA meeting. Did you find yourself writing differently about queer identity in Acts as opposed to your earlier books The Clerk’s Tale and The Road to Emmaus?

  SR: There’s a question! Yes. I wrote in my poet’s memoir that I didn’t “come out” so much as “came in,” came into myself. I did not readily accept my queerness: I wanted to die rather than deal with my difference. But here I am. Some of the histrionics embarrass me now. It’s not so bad to be me, and this settling into me happened even more during the decade I wrote Acts, that was an act in itself, loving myself and loving my life, and Madrid is a great city to love yourself in and to be loved in, a city of love affairs and liberation: Madrid liberated me and my work. I was somewhat of an uptight American prior to that and by the time I left, the language and the country and the men and the women had changed me. All this led to a deep gratitude for the gifts I have been given, the precious life I’ve had. When you are removed from your country you see your homeland in a different light. My queer identity has evolved. I stress, it has taken a long time for me to settle into myself. No one’s fault. If The Clerk’s Tale was about damage and distance, if Emmaus was about forgiveness and closeness, then Acts is about joy and release, what I am starting to write about now turns more to love and openness, love and some grief, that seems to be the mix in my sixties. I want to celebrate the gift of life.

  KG: In the first section of “Tres Crepuscúlos” we are given two axioms for poetry: “I qualify before the old-timers to say poetry / is close to outer space” and “poetry is what we do while we wait / to come into the kingdom where what we see / is not how it went . . . .” The poem ends by saying, “I swear there is not one thing in this universe / . . . that is not buried / with opportunity and desire.” Talk to us about these axioms and how you conceive of poetry’s relationship to opportunity and desire.

  SR: I love poetry more than anything else, and I don’t know why. Everything I have done has been in celebration of poetry. My prose book was all about poetry! I can’t explain it exactly. As Dad lay dying he turned to me and said, “Why poetry?” I said, “I don’t know. I just love it. Can’t get enough of the stuff.” Poetry opens ways of thinking: I am not lying when I tell you that more than once the unconscious writing of certain poems has literally called things into the world: a lover once, and then a country in another moment. Be careful what you write! There is a charm and charge with poetry, they are like spells, you know?

  KG: Speaking of spells, the poems in “Tres Crepuscúlos” are syntactically complicated by running, enjambed lines and lack of punctuation, quite different from other poems in the book. What is your relationship to the line—the unit of measure in poetry—and what informs your decisions when it comes to the line’s relationship to the sentence in your work?

  SR: I’ve tried all kinds of things as I’ve moved along, from a metrical sonnet to a prose poem, and found some measure of success, I think, in each. Those poems you are referring to, the way I indented them, comes from looking at Machado and how his poems were laid out in Spanish bookshops. It’s all fairly organic. I hear a line and see a line and away I go. Some of the poems in this book were influenced by Henri Cole, who recently wrote very short-lined poems and I wanted some of that compression here, which I hadn’t done much of, the punctuation-less poems I felt freed me up some. A bit of W. S. Merwin there too and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Headwaters, a fabulous book if you haven’t read it. Then I wanted bigger and broader canvases which came with the sequences.

  KG: You recently published a tremendously gorgeous book of watercolors called All The Beauty Still Left. Acts makes reference to art, beginning with its epigraph by Diane Arbus and then references to painting your mother in “In Solitaria Stanza”: “He will paint his mother / with shades of burgundy, / the color water down / and a mint green accent . . . He always paints what / isn’t there, but is there.” I’m really interested in the final line of this poem: “Painting is the kinder art.” Though elliptical in nature, it seems to be making an implicit statement that writing is the less-kind art. Talk to us about these dual practices of writing and painting as two different ways of rendering people. Do you see one as less-kind?

  SR: That line just came to me from the ether. But words can be exacting. Painting is an art I love very much and painting helps me think more and more as I age. I love Hockney for example, all those colors! In the Yorkshire landscape. I love them. But their effect on the soul is so different from a poem, isn’t it? Poetry is close, very close, to painting. But you can be unkind in a poem in a way different from a painting. Words have a different kind of power than tubes of paint. Or so I think. That the mouth is crueler than the eye. You could do a mean portrait, I suppose, as you could do a mean poem: in aging, in loving the world more, that doesn’t interest me in the least. Meanness equates with smallness, and I’m after bigger game in art. I think, in the poem, about my mother aging in her wheelchair, I see the potential for the words to be crueler than anything I might paint. Painting seems kinder.

  KG: By the end of the book the poems turn elegiac in nature, describing the deterioration of the speaker’s parents to dementia and old age. In the last section of “Poeta En Nueva York,” you write:

  My dear mother, you drool and have become
  someone else, you look back. Grow salty,
  have lost language like luggage. My old love,
  my love who gave me language that I love,
  when there are no words, there are only acts.

  Act, the noun, is “a thing done, a deed.” Action, the verb form, means “to do something.” Is the poem an act or an action? What about language? What about love?

  SR: What a great question. I love the words “act” and “acts.” At some primal level I was thinking about language and Anglo-Saxon sharp syllables, of which we have so many in English, and the languid round sounds of Spanish. I love the way “acts” sounds exactly like “ax” and the only way you know which is which is context. Try explaining that to someone learning English. That said, your question: a poem is an act, a thing created, and it is enacted, embodied like no other thing I can think of. The lines in that poem sort of floated in from outer space. When I got to “there are only acts,” I knew it was right, but I wasn’t even sure what I was saying–only that it was right. I think Elizabeth Bishop felt something like that at the end of “At The Fishhouses.” Like an ax coming down. What does this say about poem-making when there are no words, when words are what make the poem? What use is a poem that cannot save your own mother? I was thinking mightily about language also in this book because my English was going underground half the time in Spain. And my own mother’s disappearance from the stage with her declining health made me think much about her and how she taught me language, the miracle of mothers teaching their children language. All this was on my mind as I sat in Madrid, Madrid being a second mother teaching me another language and to learn that language required many faithful acts.

  KG: Can you tell us about what you are working on now?

  SR: I am writing some new poems now with the advent of the news that FSG will publish my collected poems, entitled, Love IV: Collected Poems, the title coming from a combined reference to George Herbert’s “Love (III)” and Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III. Nearly all of the ten poems I am working on there have something to do with place–autobiography seems to be fading fast. The New Yorker published one this year. I’ve been absent from the magazine for fifteen years, the amount of time I have been working as a priest, probably no accident. Putting together this book of all my poems over the past forty years, excites me. The book comes out in 2030.

  Kimberly Grey is the author of four books including the genre defying BEWILDER MEANT (forthcoming from Persea Books, 2027) and A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing, an essay collection. She is the recipient of fellowships from Stanford University, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati, where she earned a PhD. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the graduate program at the University of North Texas.

Acts: Poems

By Spencer Reece

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A man has a vision. He is walking on a road. He is going to bring the followers of Jesus to Jerusalem. He will persecute them. But something happens. He is struck on a road just outside Damascus, and his life is readjusted. He then is the recipient of hardship: the Lord will show him the great things he must suffer for his name's sake (Acts 9:16). The book in which Saul becomes Paul is called Acts. The vicar of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island, gives this same title to his newest book of poems.

Like Paul, Spencer Reece has journeyed to see what he would suffer as a servant of Christ--for we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God (Acts 14:22). Reece writes of his residencies in Madrid, Honduras, and the East Coast of the United States as Paul tells us of his journeys to Lystra, Derbe, and Lycaonia--their foldout beds with a mattress coil that pokes their backbone.

It's suffering enough in itself, this Christ servitude: "I write this among bare walls, mildew stains, / and nail holes. I grow obsolete among the blue tiles." There are pipes that don't work. Stairs that creak. The discomfort of not having a place of one's own. But in weariness--in the backwater places with orphans and those left beside the road in the fast-moving traffic of this world--Reece envisions another reality, not of this world but of one to come. "Acts is the biography of the Holy Spirit, / tracking the story of how the faith spread / with bread and spit and letters."

Reece is a master painter of detail. A librarian smells like mothballs. The air has the stench of a commode. Shirts are stained with sweat. Refrigerator trucks fill with the dead during the pandemic. "O, buckling blue esotery falling apart! / My anonymity increases with each entrance. / Will our hope be transfigured by this dust?" Reece does not ignore the hard parts of the Christian journey.

He experiences faith in the real world. He sheds light on the sometimes doggedness of pastoral work. It's almost as if the ministry were a trial in which the Lord asks, Are you willing to follow me even through this? "I am what I am and have not been called in vain," both the vicar and the apostle insist. They will bring others with them. Their letters and words will help when the path is rugged.

"Those who have never been told of him shall see, and those who have never heard of him shall understand," writes Paul (Rom. 15:21), and Reece keeps this mission in mind. His descriptions are palpable. The reader feels present with the poet as he writes, "Upstairs the chandelier sparkles on the floor / and the instructions for heat are painted over--/ they look like Braille." These poems have the same quality as the impressionistic watercolor paintings in his 2021 book All the Beauty Still Left.

For the Christian reader, Reece's poems trail with verses from the epistles, such as Hebrews 11:37-38: "They were stoned to death; they were sawn in two; they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented--of whom the world was not worthy." As a whole, the collection offers a road map through faith and a well-rounded portrait of Christianity. Goya's painting Christ Crucified on the cover gives hope as well as purpose to those grittier parts.

In the end, Reece writes, "I'm headed home, wherever that might be," and "poetry is what we do while we wait / to come into the kingdom." Reading these poems, one acknowledges what it takes to matter in God's kingdom--even when God asks of us suffering.

DIANE GLANCY is an essayist, poet, and novelist whose latest book is Quadrille: Christianity and the Early New England Indians.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Source Citation
Source Citation
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Glancy, Diane. "Poems for a difficult life of faith: Like Paul, Spencer Reece has journeyed to see what he would suffer as a servant of Christ." The Christian Century, vol. 142, no. 3, Mar. 2025, pp. 92+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A831971153/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c99786b2. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.

Acts

Spencer Reece. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 (128p) ISBN 978-0-374-10083-4

The excellent latest from Reece (The Road to Emmans) is immersed in a faithful, but not unquestioning, lyricism, in part inflected by his life as a priest ("Still singing in my cell," as he puts it). Having moved to Madrid, Reece suffuses the poems with Spain's music and poetry, with allusions to Federico Garcia Lorca and Antonio Machado running throughout. The country is itself one of the embodied figures of these poems: "Spain, you smell like cigarettes--/ generous, plump, never grumpy about sex." Neither is the collection "grumpy about sex," or love. It's a carnally charged tussle between "unidentified loneliness" and "[t] he erotic barely contained." "Whatever the question the answer is love," Reece writes in the digressive, charmingly epistolary sequence "Letters from Spain." Righteousness and puritanism are the enemy in these pages, and a leavening wit seeks to amplify, and deepen, an erotic of piety. Lit up by memorable phrases ("above me Christ/ sags in his candelabra of surrender" and "the chandelier of Europe lit with empty churches"), Reece s spry musicality is amplified by his often plain-spoken, pared-down syntax: "Longer I go fewer notes/I need." These poems are generously companionable hymns of delight in service. (May)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Acts." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 7, 19 Feb. 2024, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A785161665/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c191b483. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.

The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet's Memoir. By Spencer Reece. Mar. 2021.448p. Seven Stories, $24.95 (97816442104201.81).

Reece is a poet first, and poetry's economy coupled with verbal daring characterizes his prose memoir made up of far shorter chapters--139 of them--than is usual in its genre. Each presenting a particular situation, they proceed chronologically, shifting in tone and subject, often quite abruptly. Chapters on extreme homosexual guilt or ruinous drinking are chockablock with analyses of salvific poems by Reeces masters--Plath, Bishop, George Herbert, Merrill, Dickinson, Hopkins, Strand--and clipped accounts of moving from place to place, job to job, and at last from reading to reading after his prizewinning first collection, The Clerk's Tale (2004), was published when he was 41 (Bishop published late, too, he soothes himself). He'd quit booze, accepted being gay, and held a long-term job with Brooks Brothers. Then he revived a youthful clerical calling and, upon ordination, went to Madrid's tiny Anglican diocese. Indelible characters include his parents, his brother, a friend and a cousin both killed by homophobia, AA sponsors and counselors, poetic mentors, fellow workers, and his sexually incompatible gay partner. Reece's testimony is heart-wrenching yet triumphantly reassuring about spiritual resiliency and the consolation found in poetry.--Ray Olson

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Olson, Ray. "The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet's Memoir." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2021, p. 11. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A655228959/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a5da2b9f. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.

All the Beauty Still Left: A Poet's Painted Book of Hours

Spencer Reece. Turtle Point, $17.95 (128p) ISBN 978-1-885983-96-1

Inspired by medieval devotional guides, Reece (The Road to Emmaus), an Episcopal priest and winner of the Pushcart Prize for poetry, creates a marvelous, contemporary Book of Hours. Reece's approach is to combine quotes that have resonated with him with illustrations of places and things that have inspired him--a bird, dog, desk, bed, or window view. For example, a colorful interior of the Our Little Roses orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, is paired with Henri Cole's line: "If tenderness approaches, run to it." For compline prayers at the end of each day, Welsh poet George Herbert's words "prayer should be the key of the day and the lock of the night" appear opposite a self-portrait of Reece. The quotes--rarely longer than several lines--are an eclectic mix, including snippets from Marilyn Monroe, Fernando Pessoa, Yo-Yo Ma, Albert Einstein, and James Baldwin, while places depicted include the Acropolis in Athens, apartment buildings in Barcelona, the Los Angeles skyline, New York City's Trinity Church, and many still lifes of Old Lyme, Conn. With exquisite simplicity, these glowing pages will invite readers to their own contemplations throughout the day. (May)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
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"All the Beauty Still Left: A Poet's Painted Book of Hours." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 9, 1 Mar. 2021, pp. 63+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A654760090/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1a4a8af2. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.

Reece, Spencer THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK Seven Stories (NonFiction None) $24.95 3, 9 ISBN: 978-1-64421-042-0

A poet recounts his arduous search for authenticity.

In a resonant, deeply moving memoir, award-winning poet Reece (b. 1963) reflects on love, spirituality, family, and his torments over his sexual identity. The author’s home life was troubled: His parents bickered, drank heavily, and insisted on keeping feelings private. At school, he recalls, “boys hissed at me like vipers,” and “girls hung in the shadows.” Filled with “rage, depression, shame, layers of repressed, inarticulate complex emotions,” Reece found solace in poetry, particularly works by Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, James Merrill, Mark Strand, George Herbert, and Elizabeth Bishop, each of whom spoke to his own anguish. “Closeted, alienated, and drinking,” he admits, “I found myself aligning” especially with Bishop, whose poetry “gave me something that I hadn’t found before. A space to breathe. A stance—the art moving through her, rather than being about her—that would give me space to live and figure my way into a sexual life where I could be proud.” Sometimes suicidal and an alcoholic for years, the author didn’t come out until he was 40. Poetry, he writes, “helped block out the fact there was so much wrong inside me.” After graduating from Harvard Divinity School, instead of pursuing theology, he worked at Brooks Brothers for 12 years. He committed himself to sobriety, attending AA meetings, where he found “a family, people related to each other through suffering and joy, and I was adopted.” Reece continued to write poetry, submitting work for years before he won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize and, in 2004, got his first book published. Now an Episcopal priest, Reece recounts a hard-won journey to spiritual peace: “I didn’t come out. I came in. I came into focus. I came into myself after being long outside myself. I came into AA. I came into my body. I came into the Church.”

A beautifully written, engrossing narrative.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Reece, Spencer: THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A650107655/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5cb1607c. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.

Glancy, Diane. "Poems for a difficult life of faith: Like Paul, Spencer Reece has journeyed to see what he would suffer as a servant of Christ." The Christian Century, vol. 142, no. 3, Mar. 2025, pp. 92+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A831971153/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c99786b2. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025. "Acts." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 7, 19 Feb. 2024, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A785161665/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c191b483. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025. Olson, Ray. "The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet's Memoir." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2021, p. 11. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A655228959/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a5da2b9f. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025. "All the Beauty Still Left: A Poet's Painted Book of Hours." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 9, 1 Mar. 2021, pp. 63+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A654760090/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1a4a8af2. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025. "Reece, Spencer: THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A650107655/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5cb1607c. Accessed 26 Nov. 2025.

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