Spahr – then, there, now

“How and why do I separate my affection for the familiar body lying next to me and my compassion for the unknown citizen living halfway around the world? Does one relationship model the other? Should they be related?”

These are the questions that Siobhan Phillips of the LA Review of Books asks in tandem with Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now, a poetry collection which itself asks those very same questions. Phillips notes that in Spahr’s poems, “love does not resist the world beyond; love lets it in,” and that “the particular medium of Spahr’s work,” her “avant-garde line of post-Language poetry,” “makes connection seem freshly urgent.”