The Cloud Museum by Beth Spencer (Sixteen Rivers Press, paperback)
Publication Date: April 2, 2018
Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Art. THE CLOUD MUSEUM, Beth Spencer's debut collection, comprises two distinct worlds. In "Practicing Nowhere," we meet the shape-shifting, time-evading Alice, whose life is narrated by an anonymous "I" who loves Alice for her audacity, her humor, and her defiant insistence that "Her / esy . . . is knowing any / thing for certain." In "The Book of Jay," the artist Jay DeFeo's paintings—especially her monumental, slowly evolving "The Rose"—are transformed into language so vivid and musical that to read is to behold them in another form. Spencer opens her book with the injunction to "sharpen your mind / on the prospect of nowhere," but every line of her dazzling, inventive poems makes us grateful for the time spent in these two sharply defined worlds. Clouds may be fleeting; these poems are anything but. Their sheer beauty sharpens the mind again and again.
