East Walnut Hills

East Walnut Hills is the debut collection of poems by Emily Spencer, the winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award in Poetry.   "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 "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. Emily Spencer leads us through these poems as if through the wings of a living museum, imploring us to take our time and look—really look. But Spencer is not our tour guide, she is the artist.'" --Paige Lewis "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's crisp and alert poems are notations and noticings rooted in East Walnut Hills, Ohio. There is a warping of time, and people in these poems too: what is classic, what is new? How are traditions proscribed and inscribed? The lovely wordplay of Spencer's 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   Emily Spencer is the author of East Walnut Hills (Zone 3 Press, 2021) and winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award in Poetry. Her poems appear in the Kenyon Review, POETRY, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Spencer earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is from Cincinnati, Ohio.