Beth Spencer

The Cloud Museum Beth Spencer

Poetry. Art. THE CLOUD MUSEUM, Beth Spencer's debut collection, comprises two distinct worlds. In Practicing Nowhere, we meet the shape-shifting, time-evading Alice, whose life is narrated by an anonymous I who loves Alice for her audacity, her humor, and her defiant insistence that Her / esy . . . is knowing any / thing for certain. In The Book of Jay, the artist Jay DeFeo's paintings--especially her monumental, slowly evolving The Rose--are transformed into language so vivid and musical that to read is to behold them in another form. Spencer opens her book with the injunction to sharpen your mind / on the prospect of nowhere, but every line of her dazzling, inventive poems makes us grateful for the time spent in these two sharply defined worlds. Clouds may be fleeting; these poems are anything but. Their sheer beauty sharpens the mind again and again.