Cradle and Spoon

Debut poetry collection from Alberta-based publisher Minor Works of Death.

With, at times, spiraling self-awareness, Spencer writes herself into a new mode: the post-confessional. Unable to ignore the context that burdens confessional poets like Lowell, Sexton, and Plath--the modernist trends they resisted, the psychoanalytic theory they embraced--Spencer leans into that context and learns her own. Meaning, she uses literary theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to form novel links between her personal stories of drug addiction and loss with historical realities and poetic trends.

Spencer's brand of post-confessional poetry, then, lies at the intersection between what has been done and what can be done from within a self-imposed Kristevian feedback loop.