East Walnut Hills

Poetry. Winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award in Poetry. EAST WALNUT HILLS is the debut collection of poems by Emily Spencer. Meditations on biodiverse community and dwelling: past, present, and future.

Those who run straight away for love / return home drawing circular ovals.

EAST WALNUT HILLS, the breathtaking debut from Emily Spencer, creates a self through seeing. 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

EAST WALNUT HILLS is a brilliant achievement.--Natalie Shapero

In EAST WALNUT HILLS, the divine and the everyday are indistinguishable from one another. 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

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