The Clerk's Tale

April 5, 2004
All of the following 18 debut titles will be published in time for National Poetry Month this April. While the title poem is familiar from its recent publication on the back page of the New Yorker, the biggest chance of a breakout for Spencer Reece's The Clerk's Tale rests with Reece's street cred: he is an assistant manager at Brooks Brothers in Palm Beach. Those looking for the male equivalent of Deborah Garrison's A Working Girl Can't Win may be momentarily disappointed in the fact that few of the other poems work as critiques of working life and store culture, but should be buoyed by lines like "You are being born. Feels good./ Something enormous kisses you."

July 1, 2004
By day, Reece works as assistant manager at Brooks Brothers in Palm Beach; by night, he writes poems so exquisite, atmospheric, and varied that his first collection was deservedly selected by poet laureate Louise Gleck as winner of the 2003 Bakeless Prize of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2004
Supple, atmospheric, and lucent, Reece's entrancing lyrics evoke the diametrically opposed yet equally affecting landscapes of Minnesota and Florida and consider the axis between solitude and connection, peace and pain, philosophy and madness. Reece's poems are at once splendidly fresh and deeply rooted in poetry's rich loam as he offers a witty yet moving variation on Chaucer's " The Clerk's Tale" and echoes the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and James Merrill. No academic, Reece is a longtime Brooks Brothers employee, and, accordingly, the title poem, originally published in the " New Yorker," portrays two men, including an aging homosexual, who clerk in an upscale men's clothier in the Mall of America, an edifice Reece compares to a Gothic cathedral. Indeed, religious images surface often as the poet summons up childhood memories and evokes resonant vignettes, still lives, and today's cluttered versions of pastorals, subtly tracing the soul's uncertain progress from brute survival to transcendent receptivity and affirmation. Insightfully introduced by poet laureate Louise Gluck, Reece's striking debut yields new revelations with each reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)