Marty's Walk, by Kyra Spence

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The poems of Marty’s Walk are written “inside the shape of longing,” out of “dream geography,” and from “the other world,” which is also “this one.” The work maps intimate histories and local mythologies through signs, incarnations, and atmospheres. Spence encounters and externalizes emotional conditions in landscapes haunted by physical and emotional specters.

In those landscapes, desire animates and bewilders—desire, above all, to look and truly see, to listen and to be heard, to belong to a scene, to have “any story” to make sense of the dark. The speaker attempts, over and over, to communicate with entities that may or may not be listening: the illustration of man on a billboard, figures in memory, characters in dreams, the buried boy, in turn positing the poem as the place for an otherwise impossible form of communication.

Kyra Spence is a writer from Philadelphia. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Bodega Magazine, Bennington Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and with Tess Carroll, she is the co-creator of the podcast Rummage World.