on Acts by Spencer Reece

I came to Spencer Reece’s poetry through the Best American Poetry series. His anthologized poem, “The Road to Emmaus,” which turned out to be the title poem of his second collection, seemed an unlikely, braided short story. I still go back to it. It was a testament to what I had been attempting at the time and have since deserted. The poem was religious in its intention; religious in every sense of the word. I felt like Reece had refused to take his eye away from a moment in his life until he had exhausted it of meaning.

As someone who grew up very Catholic but is no longer practicing, I am always enthralled by writers who imbue their writing with piety, even though some people assume that contemporary poetry and religion are immiscible. If at all religion, specifically western religion, is to be mentioned in many other poets’ works, it is usually peered at with suspicion, harshly criticized because of religion’s tense relationships with self-expression and secular thought. But Reece’s work renders faith and queerness as intertwined rather than oppositional. 

His new book, Acts, begins on a seemingly romantic note. In its first poem, “San Sebastián,” Reece declares:

Despite the poem’s title, I had first thought he was alluding to the political—cell, fleeing. Even several lines on, Reece goes on to declare that “Martyrdom bores me,” but the poem, midway, steers itself to love—“My hookup my flamenco”—and toward its end, reveals itself to be about the attendant loneliness of being left—“I am alone. / Wasn’t I always? / Wasn’t I?” Male homosexuality, fueled in part by stigma and relationship struggles, has often been accompanied by loneliness.

A couple of short poems later, the book segues into Reece’s forte, the long poem, such that it feels like the shorter poems were merely gearing up to the main set. In “Letters from Spain,” written in seventeen almost equal sections, Reece documents his struggles of being the National Secretary for the Bishop of Spain. He begins by admitting that his “Spanish is delicate” and that he “misunderstand[s] each liturgy,” then proceeds to complain that the house he lives in is so cold “I write with my coat on / and there is no hot water in the sink.” This kind of hardship is familiar in Reece’s work; The Clerk’s Tale (2004) paid homage to his repetitive, unrewardingly monastic life as a clerk at Brooks Brothers, while The Road to Emmaus (2014) described his time as an Episcopal priest and a period in his life when he worked as a chaplain in a hospital. 

But when it seems like Reece has settled in the house in Spain, he does what many gay men might do in a strange city—he looks for love on an app, where he meets a “muscular” man “who hardly speaks English.” In subsequent sections, he contemplates what it means to say masses in a church where three priests were executed. Later, he namedrops the actor Viggo Mortensen stopping by the post office. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to make of digressions in this poem, but maybe I am merely suspicious of my feelings of perplexity. Later on, we find that the muscular man, Manuel, has dumped Reece. He’s “alone” again. In participating in this tradition of letter writing, Reece believes he’s merely continuing in the ritual as were the disciples in the Book of Acts; even though it’s not clear who the intended addressee of this epistolary poem is, and there’s a lingering sense that the addressee is changing.

In August 1936, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca was assassinated by right-wing Nationalist militia who might have also murdered him because of his homosexuality. Some accounts of Lorca’s life hint that he was murdered because of his leftist beliefs. His corpse was never recovered. At the beginning of the first section of the poem “Spanish Dances,” Reece relays observations of Spain with the bluntness of a carefree child. “Spain, you smell like cigarettes,” he declares. “You growl and snap / about your short girlie-voiced dictator,” he grumbles two lines later. In the next section, Reece mentions a rumor that Lorca’s body has been found. Reece, who has previously engaged with piety by reinterpreting well-known stories—the title poem of The Road to Emmaus is a reimagination of a biblical narrative—is treading another familiar territory. But in “Spanish Dances,” it is not clear if the discovery of Lorca’s body is a hoax or not. This moment in the poem sculpts a political window in its wall, perhaps an allusive tension, until the train of thought fizzes away into the mundaneness of Reece’s life in Spain:

The structure of “Spanish Dances” oscillates between the personal and the public, the nonpartisan and the political, the mundane and the thrilling. Its broad scope allows for an expansive vision. Each section, typically made up of five or six quatrains, manages to encase his love and disdain for Spain, as in the closing lines of section three:

Though Lorca seems to have been mentioned in passing in “Spanish Dances,” in a much later poem, “Poeta En Nueva York,” whose title alludes to the title of Lorca’s posthumous collection, Lorca’s most important work, Reece revisits the minutiae of Lorca’s life in more precise detail:

The presence of Lorca’s body appears to dignify the details, or absence of details, surrounding his real death. It also provides some soft landing for the tragic details of Reece’s own mother’s illness, the tumor expanding in her brain, so that placing these two tragedies side by side, the reader can appreciate, toward the end of the poem sequence, Reece’s belief that in the absence of love, there can only exist “acts.” Love becomes the sanctifying ointment, such that, in the succeeding poem “Humpty Dumpty,” when “after the war / Picasso / never went // back / to Spain / Spain / made // his heart / a suitcase,” Reece makes a case for what happens when someone has lost the love they used to have for their motherland: they resort to self-exile.

While the strong poems in this collection blaze with their brilliance and their acutely observed moments, a few others further the collective narrative with their assonant playfulness, as in the poem “At the Pitt Rivers Museum,” a one-sentence verse which concludes thusly: 

This in turn gives the collection a sense of variety and enriches its themes through stylistic contrast.

Even though affection, in its myriad forms, its accompanying afflictions, seems to be at the heart of this book, the poems manage to stop themselves and contemplate seemingly mundane matters that end up producing poetic beauty—how can you not appreciate a line like “if you climb the stairs the honeyed wood / will creak like organ pedals”? Herein, Reece manages to take attention away from himself. 

Reece’s previous work has been criticized by some as displaying lyrical narcissism, but I beg to differ. Yes, there’s the mundaneness that sometimes appears to linger too long; however, Reece has managed to turn his gaze outward in Acts. In this outwardness, Reece does some real self-reflection about his life in Spain, and more especially on that of Lorca’s, though it doesn’t always result in tangible consequences, especially in the shorter poems, which is entirely fine. These poems are diary entries, not thought pieces. Not to mention that Reece is one of our contemporary poets who pulls off unpredictable rhymes. 

I arrived at the end of this book feeling it was an homage to the things that have become dear to Reece in the near-decade since his second collection came out: Spain, his retinue of queer friends, his mother, and poets passed or persecuted. His poetic attention seems to have shifted to recording his community-building and his effort in making meaningful human connections. Acts is a testimony to the abiding memory of what matters in life: that we have fully lived on this earth, that we have sincerely loved, regardless of whether that love was requited or not.

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Acts. By Spencer Reece. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. 128 pp. $27.00.