Beth Spencer
Beth Spencer
Beth Spencer is the founding editor of Bear Star Press, which publishes poetry and short fiction by writers living in the western states. Her poems and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in River Styx, Tin House, Litro, Lodestone Journal, Cutthroat, Split This Rock, Winning Writers, and elsewhere, and a couple of her one-act plays and a collection of flash pieces have been locally produced. She is a board member of Slow Theatre in Chico and lives in Cohasset, California, with her husband and dog.
“This collection dives deep. In The Cloud Museum, Beth Spencer leads us on a physical and spiritual journey into two worlds. . . . These poems are conjuring spells. Rich in imagist language, Spencer’s poems transcend simple explanation as they transform us at many levels. Much as an oil painting accrues power and depth layer by subtle layer, this collection opens out and out, bursting into the essence and vortex of mystery itself.” —Pamela Uschuk
The Cloud Museum, Beth Spencer’s debut collection, comprises two distinct worlds. In “Practicing Nowhere,” we meet the shape-shifting, time-evading Alice. In “The Book of Jay,” the artist Jay DeFeo’s paintings are transformed into a vivid and musical language. Every line of Spencer’s dazzling, inventive poems makes us grateful for the time spent in these two sharply defined worlds. Their sheer beauty sharpens the mind again and again.