If the House

In these poems, well-known spaces both reassure and imperil, and language both anchors and disorients. Molly Spencer’s speakers navigate the landscape of human experience, building upon the cycles of a household throughout the seasons of the year. Ordinary places and things - a kitchen table, a memory, a beloved’s thigh - are viewed as if through the lens of a shifting, unsettling kaleidoscope. This incisive collection suggests that the imagined comfort we find in familiarity and routine belies the unease that lingers beneath.