Spine of the Hug: Poems by Alec Hershman is a debut collection more than twenty years in the making: fifty-three lyric poems rooted in the landscapes of Michigan and Kentucky that move through grief, desire, caregiving, and the long aftermath of childhood with rare precision and emotional courage.
Organized in three sections, [Stillness], [So I Came to Learn], and [The Past Will End], the collection traces the arc of a life: from the vivid, unresolved textures of childhood through the intimate territories of desire and loss to the long, patient work of memory and self-knowledge. The poems inhabit a world of caregiving and dying, of desire rendered obliquely, of childhood as a country that does not release its citizens. They are populated by a mother waving from the water and receding, a gambler stepping into daylight after a long night, a boy in a swimming pool turning blue from shyness, a dying man whose breath sounds like quails signing air in the thickets.
Working in the tradition of Larry Levis, whose epigraph opens the collection, and shaped by the teaching of Carl Phillips and Frank Bidart, Spine of the Hug brings to American lyric poetry a distinctly contemporary sensibility: queer, geographically rooted, and unflinching in its attention to what the body knows and what the mind refuses to say.
Alec Hershman is the author of three previous short volumes: For a Second, In the Dark (MWC Press, 2023), Permanent and Wonderful Storage (Seven Kitchens, 2019) and The Egg Goes Under (Seven Kitchens, 2017). He has received awards from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, The Jentel Foundation, and The Institute for Sustainable Living, Art, and Natural Design. He lives with his husband and dogs in Michigan.
"If Shakespeare possessed what Keats described as the 'negative capability' of 'being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,' Alec Hershman performs in Spine of the Hug a doing that is fully the equivalent of that being: again and again these poems 'do something as intimate as whisper / into the felt canoe of the horse's ear,' at just enough remove from the house 'that whether or not to hear / the domino-clap of the screen-door' becomes a reader-empowering choice." — H.L. Hix, author of Chromatic, finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry
"As a work deeply attentive to method, Spine of the Hug pursues the how of life in the dialectal and absurd, in scenes of diorama stillness and vertiginous imagination, in metaphor and involution. 'The excavation became a lake. / Memory sent me swimming,' Alec Hershman writes, and the easy intimacy of his poems belies the strangeness in them—their wily earnestness that casts the reader to the 'emerging middle / of some emerging thing,' where a sublime lucidity seeps through the seams of language. It's a profound pleasure to be in the waters of his inventive, philosophical, and time-haunted work, 'lit with impending— '" — Willie Lin, author of Conversation Among Stones
"If Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath, and Larry Levis somehow had a baby, he might grow up to sound something like this. Spine of the Hug is a beauty-fed bildungsroman of mind and tongue--a snorkel-tour of the poet's glistering lexicon and its various habitats. In poem after poem, Hershman reminds us that 'yes, the heart is a floodplain.' These are poems I want to stay with and in. I loved this book!" — JoAnna Novak, author of Domestirexia
"Spine of the Hug is full of lush details that make us see the world both anew and as it is: strange, wonderful, and brief. With crackling diction and razor-sharp observation, Hershman finds the pain, oddity, and beauty hidden inside the warm embrace of nostalgia, and makes us fall in love with poetry all over again." — Annah Browning, author of Cryptid
