[09/15/26] Hershman, Alec: Spine of the Hug

Iron Oak Editions, paperback

Publication Date: September 15, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

Spine of the Hug: Poems by Alec Hershman is a debut collection more than twenty years in the making: fifty-three lyric poems rooted in the landscapes of Michigan and Kentucky that move through grief, desire, caregiving, and the long aftermath of childhood with rare precision and emotional courage.

Organized in three sections, [Stillness], [So I Came to Learn], and [The Past Will End], the collection traces the arc of a life: from the vivid, unresolved textures of childhood through the intimate territories of desire and loss to the long, patient work of memory and self-knowledge. The poems inhabit a world of caregiving and dying, of desire rendered obliquely, of childhood as a country that does not release its citizens. They are populated by a mother waving from the water and receding, a gambler stepping into daylight after a long night, a boy in a swimming pool turning blue from shyness, a dying man whose breath sounds like quails signing air in the thickets.

Working in the tradition of Larry Levis, whose epigraph opens the collection, and shaped by the teaching of Carl Phillips and Frank Bidart, Spine of the Hug brings to American lyric poetry a distinctly contemporary sensibility: queer, geographically rooted, and unflinching in its attention to what the body knows and what the mind refuses to say.