Spencer Williams

Readings

A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how has that shifted or remained constant for you over time

Eduardo C. Corral, Slow Lightning (Yale University Press, 2012)

Eduardo C. Corral's Slow Lightning was the first collection I read by a gay Mexican poet, and it blew my mind as a high schooler only familiar with, at that point, Button Poetry's YouTube page, Brave New Voices, and Shel Silverstein. It’s a book I return to again and again, especially when I feel stuck in my own writing. Corral is particularly incredible at endings, leaving the reader hanging on images that balance the abstract with emotional concreteness. Slow Lightning was also the first poetry collection I bought for myself, free from the constraints of a syllabus. My copy is worn as hell and bent every which way—a sign of true love, if there ever was one

A book of poetry by a friend and how knowing that poet affects your reading

Hannah Bonner, Another Woman (EastOver Press, 2024)

Hannah Bonner’s collection Another Woman is one that I’ve had in my email inbox for a couple years now, and it hits each time I open it. The book was finally published over the summer and so I’m glad to finally own a hard copy. Bonner is a master at sparsity—some of these poems last only a few lines but strike with such precision. We’ve had this ongoing conversation about how boring it is to be asked questions about being both a woman who fucks and an artist, and how those two things are often conflated as somehow producing, or being involved with, the other. We want women who are bored of fucking, who fuck with a shrug. That’s kind of the energy that Bonner’s collection has—fucking is matter of fact, a not particularly shiny want. Typically, I write these long, scattered passages and knowing Bonner and her work has made me want to try containment a bit. Not everything has to be said to be known is the lesson I pull from her work.

A poem or book you like to teach

Margaree Little, Rest (Four Way Books, 2018)

Margaree Little’s Rest is a book I’ve taught three times now. It’s a collection that details Little’s encounter with a nameless skeleton while volunteering for an organization that aides those crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. The book is at once an elegy for this unidentified crosser, but also to all those who’ve crossed and died between these borders. It’s an incredibly moving, incredibly ethical book of witness. I teach it to my students as an example of a work that sustains one’s focus of a singular topic across multiple poems.

A collection of essays

David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Vintage, 1991)

David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration is a collection that electrified me. It’s a hilarious, scathing, heartbreaking, and formally beautiful work. I wish I had read it earlier in my life, but I’m glad it landed into my hands regardless of time. He has such a way of capturing the ugly, beating heart of New York City in a time of such crisis and political violence towards queer people. Everyone should read this book and let the bitterness linger on the tongue for a bit. Absolutely unhinged prose, and I mean that in a good way.

A visual book/poem

Tanya Marcuse, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Books, 2019)

I’m obsessed with Tanya Marcuse’s photography book Fruitless | Fallen | Woven. Split into three mini-dioramic booklets, Marcuse captures waste and rotting fruit and the changing seasons in a really horrifying—and trippy—way. I have a huge fear of snakes and so when I found one in one of the images, after not having noticed it before, I was petrified. And yet, it’s such a glorious detail to me now. I look at these dense photographs and notice something new every time. Despite their abrasiveness, they give me a kind of peculiar peace. The book is also a gorgeous, large object—I love it when a book’s design is just as considered as its content. It makes me want to drop out and go into printmaking and design, which I have no talent for. But I also love when a photograph hits me in the same way that a good poem does—that's the power of Marcuse's lens.

Writings

A Funeral

When I consider the facts of my life I inadvertently stumble upon destruction.

Here are ashes in a box on the piano. Here is a teaspoon of ash

in a union mug for the morning commute.

From the window, birds circle a feeder, are fed, then flee.

The Williams Family once owned a swimming pool but it’s gone now,

filled with dirt, and I’ve only known it as yard.

Try as I might, I have no better metaphor for transgender.

O hole in the ground,

what many faces you have. The sheer

amount of cat bodies beneath you

conjures scratching sounds at my childhood door.

What do we call this kind of care:

Dad buried Posha in a Baskin Robbins takeout bag

when I was 11 so I wouldn’t see the body.

When I reflect upon the dead, tears produce my migraines.

I tell close friends that even as I say myself a woman,

there’s a voice in me that won’t belong at any funeral.

So maybe the solution to grief is more cats,

or the internet. For instance, today, I was consumed

by a stranger’s tweet about the loss of a parent.

It startled me to know this pain

about a stranger. Suddenly, the only thing I knew.

As a precursor to mourning,

I keep tabs on my family’s accumulated household pain.

For every cat buried in the swimming yard,

there is a mark in Dad’s arm from cancers frozen off.

Is there a word for that? One thing buried

to make room for something’s growth.

The shape of Dad’s wounds— tiny craters

in a yard, or a pool, a mausoleum of pets.

Ode to Bruce, My Roommate’s Cat

These days, my days

are defined by the angle

my roommate’s cat takes

near my feet in the morning,

whether his weight

is a pressing force upon

my own, or simply

a surprising shape I notice

once my retainer pops out

and my glasses adjust.

If pressure exists, I know

it will carry on through the day,

the smallest palm against my chest,

a soft, whining alarm.

Are we hungry?

Lonely?

Either feeling gives way

to crucial want.

But if instead, the cat is shape,

I know to move through

my work ceaselessly,

taking care not to remark

upon a single catastrophe,

though they all will remain

specters over every twitch of limb,

push of sorry mouth.

It disturbs me sometimes,

this desire to be dictated,

by the casual terror

who paws at sunlight

cast on the wall,

thinking it’ll catch like an object,

solid as a mouse.

Only one thing is simple now:

Mornings belong to Bruce.

Or rather, he takes them

for as long as he needs.

Small mass, so oblivious,

so utterly in tune.

He is there, and so

like science, I must be too.

Spencer Williams is the author of TRANZ (Four Way Books, 2024). Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, Apogee, Pleiades, and PANK, among others. She received her MFA in creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark and is currently a PhD candidate in poetics at SUNY, Buffalo.