Soul Cake: Poems

by Lisa Russ Spaar

In Soul Cake, Lisa Russ Spaar makes late-life, hibernal forays into ecstasy, God hunger, soul-making, language, beauty, and an unquenched desire for the b/Beloved.
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.

Genres: Poetry

60 pages, Paperback

Published May 5, 2026

About the author

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008), Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2012), and Orexia (Persea, 2017). She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems, and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. A collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, was published by Drunken Boat Media in 2013. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, an All University Teaching Award, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and the 2013-2014 Faculty Award of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, Boston Review, Blackbird, IMAGE, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Slate, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals and quarterlies, and her commentaries and columns about poetry appear regularly or are forthcoming in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She was short-listed for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing, and has taught at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Seattle Pacific University, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. --Poetry Foundation

Reviews

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lisa Russ Spaar’s Soul Cake moves with a kind of incantatory grace, its lines shaped as much by sound as by sense. The collection’s sonorous musicality is immediately striking—vowels linger, consonants chime, and rhythms unfurl with a near-liturgical cadence that invites the reader to listen as closely as they read. Spaar’s diction is unapologetically elevated, yet never inert; it lifts the poems into a register where the sacred and the sensual coexist, where language itself seems to incandesce.

What makes Soul Cake especially compelling is its tonal range. The poems are by turns ecstatic and joyous, then quietly pensive, even elegiac, often within the same breath. That emotional modulation feels earned rather than ornamental, as if each shift in mood were a natural consequence of the music guiding it. Spaar writes with a deep awareness of tradition—echoes of older forms and voices surface—but the work never feels derivative. Instead, it achieves a poised intensity, a lyrical richness that sustains both rapture and reflection without diminishing either.