Soul Cake: Poetry by Lisa Russ Spaar

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author/editor of fourteen books, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (Persea Books, 2021) and a debut novel, Paradise Close (Persea Books; 2022; paperback 2025). A new collection of poems, Soul Cake (Persea Books) will be published in May 2026. Her short fiction and lyric essays have appeared in Literary Imagination, The American Scholar, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry, and a NEH Distinguished Professorship. She is professor of English at the University of Virginia, where for many years she directed the Creative Writing Program.

Spring Cleaning Carol

Always too soon to impart
how long the re-cast heart

will last. Literally, I mean.
The stiff ground, greening,

awaits where we are going,
patience a violence, sowing

hope despite itself. Despair not,
one might hazard, yard

already mostly stalwart weeds.
Welcome, rough straits,

ascendant. Spider webs older
than the years transpired

since we first—. Let them be.
The fly’s carcass, too. Plight’s debris.

His Creeks

aren’t really his, but who attends
   them more, riparian corridors
that course in riffles undulant

or in triplet falls, now clear & flecked
   with ice, now mossed, sultry
through silted banks, beneath

a may-fly’s dangling earring.
   Whether fed by spring or seep,
they run by forces grave

& sometimes pool to glass
   that shows another world,
the minute warren rooms

of halved black walnuts, starry
   leaf-litter, a stalwart stand
of cress. A brace of minnows.

Love’s deep stare. And who else names
   or cares to name them,
gliding over gravel, coarser cobble,

monikers writ on water,
   as they say. A script of erasure,
but for his face.

Source:

Poems © Lisa Russ Spaar

Forthcoming in Soul Cake: Poems (Persea Books, May 5, 2026)

https://www.lisarussspaar.com/soulcake