The poetry of Spencer Reece, a renowned writer who is also an Episcopal priest, is suffused with tenderness, humanity, and a wondrous 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, Reece's third book of poetry, is the product of a decade of work and of a life acutely lived. In these poems, he celebrates the language and literature of Spain and tracks his tenure as a minister there. At times, the collection is a love letter to Madrid; at other moments, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where the speaker's parents lived, and Rhode Island, where he now resides. The poems are also an homage to the letter as an art form, a rich if waning means of connection. In Acts, Reece confronts grief and love, loneliness and self-acceptance, with honesty, artful lyricism, and, above all, a true and luminous grace.
