East Walnut Hills

Milky Way, indifferent sparkly
company—red
fireworks over the Ohio, heart-shaped

in smoky, gray shared-heavens—North, South.
Black veins,
trees’ silhouettes against illuminated hilltop,

see the yellow clay exposed. See the slid
land.
How we forget the Earth gives way.

Emily Spencer earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, POETRY, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She was a Boston University global writing fellow. She is from Cincinnati, Ohio.

“East Walnut Hills, the breathtaking debut from Emily Spencer, creates a self through seeing. In this collection, the meandering and curious consciousness of the flaneur is joined with the intuitive visual strategies of the artist, tracing lines (architectural, historical, spiritual) through identity, voice, and place. This site-specific book is at once map and photograph, a history of place tied to the quotidian. For Spencer, to dwell is to understand the impact of memory, capitalism, education, and ecology on one’s location. Cincinnati is nowhere and everywhere—humming with grief and life—in these exquisite poems.” —Claudia Rankine

“This is a book that proceeds in electric hushes, spare and lithe and deeply smart. The poems wind their way through Ohio neighborhoods, through husks of industry and commerce, through transport and abandonment, through invitation and exclusion, through histories, presents, and futures of biodiverse community—gender, race, and class. East Walnut Hills is a brilliant achievement.” —Natalie Shapero

“Emily Spencer's crisp and alert poems are notations and noticings rooted in East Walnut Hills, Ohio. The lovely wordplay of her work, as a community-based global citizen, presents an expansive meditation on Black life and perception through residue, through the ghosts of where we, in the particular, have been and are.” —Tracie Morris

“In East Walnut Hills, the divine and the everyday are indistinguishable from one another. Eden is both mythically untouchable and just down the street in Cincinnati, Ohio.” —Paige Lewis

Milky Way, indifferent sparkly
company—red
fireworks over the Ohio, heart-shaped

in smoky, gray shared-heavens—North, South.
Black veins,
trees’ silhouettes against illuminated hilltop,

see the yellow clay exposed. See the slid
land.
How we forget the Earth gives way.

East Walnut Hills

Milky Way, indifferent sparkly
company—red
fireworks over the Ohio, heart-shaped

in smoky, gray shared-heavens—North, South.
Black veins,
trees’ silhouettes against illuminated hilltop,

see the yellow clay exposed. See the slid
land.
How we forget the Earth gives way.

Emily Spencer earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review, POETRY, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She was a Boston University global writing fellow. She is from Cincinnati, Ohio.

“East Walnut Hills, the breathtaking debut from Emily Spencer, creates a self through seeing. In this collection, the meandering and curious consciousness of the flaneur is joined with the intuitive visual strategies of the artist, tracing lines (architectural, historical, spiritual) through identity, voice, and place. This site-specific book is at once map and photograph, a history of place tied to the quotidian. For Spencer, to dwell is to understand the impact of memory, capitalism, education, and ecology on one’s location. Cincinnati is nowhere and everywhere—humming with grief and life—in these exquisite poems.” —Claudia Rankine

“This is a book that proceeds in electric hushes, spare and lithe and deeply smart. The poems wind their way through Ohio neighborhoods, through husks of industry and commerce, through transport and abandonment, through invitation and exclusion, through histories, presents, and futures of biodiverse community—gender, race, and class. East Walnut Hills is a brilliant achievement.” —Natalie Shapero

“Emily Spencer's crisp and alert poems are notations and noticings rooted in East Walnut Hills, Ohio. The lovely wordplay of her work, as a community-based global citizen, presents an expansive meditation on Black life and perception through residue, through the ghosts of where we, in the particular, have been and are.” —Tracie Morris

“In East Walnut Hills, the divine and the everyday are indistinguishable from one another. Eden is both mythically untouchable and just down the street in Cincinnati, Ohio.” —Paige Lewis