Back Roads and Ditch-Wise: Against Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry

Molly Spencer’s recent poetry and critical writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, FIELD, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her debut poetry collection, If the House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), won the Brittingham Prize; a second collection, Relic and the Plum, won the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition and is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in fall 2020. Spencer is a poetry editor for The Rumpus and teaches at the University of Michigan.