Soul Cake
Lisa Russ Spaar’s seventh full-length collection of poems, Soul Cake, which takes its title from an ancient mummer/wassailer’s carol, leans with late-life, hibernal ecstasy into Spaar’s flood subjects: God hunger, soul-making, language, beauty, and an unquenched desire for the b/Beloved. Bodily and mysterious, the poems wrest from their rich, sumptuous, surprising lexicon flashes of dread, beyonding, and gnosis.
“Lisa Russ Spaar is a poet who celebrates language as a world and, at the same time, exudes a profound love for the world that her language attempts, with passionate urgency, to signify. I have long loved the material extravagance of this language and the powerful life-force of her poems. Each line is an earthly musculature that's ripe and thrillingly on the verge of unruly. Soul Cake is a book of mortal and ecstatic wonder and rewards those of us who read with eye, ear, heart, and head—with our whole bodies.”—Jennifer Chang
“Lisa Russ Spaar's brilliant lyricism lights up intricate surfaces and divines the depths in sonnets and carols tuned to every form of echo—rhyme, dream, heartache, etymology, memory. Exquisitely concentrated, haunted by epic ‘wonder lust,’ this is passionate metaphysical poetry to sate soul-hunger.”—Margaret Ross
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of a novel, Paradise Close; six acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems; and The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, a collection of poetry history and criticism. She was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Spaar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where for many years she directed the MFA program.
Publication date: May 5, 2026
Original trade paperback w/French flaps, 80 pages, ISBN 978-0-89255-642-7, 53/8 x 8¼”, $20.00, Poetry