Too Like the Lightning

Flipping the power dynamic between target and harasser, each poem in Too Like the Lightning is a bitingly funny takedown of the harasser's gaslight: "I was just paying you a compliment." So what if it were a compliment? Too Like the Lightning imagines love stories whose first sparks are those too-brief missed connections on the street.

Spencer has been collecting true stories of harassment of women in public spaces for close to a decade and turning them into hyper romantic odes to pervs. Spencer says, "Street harassment exists, in a very real way, on the same spectrum of behaviors as sexual violence. The harasser knows what he's doing: he's not hitting on her, he's exercising control. He's putting her in her place in public. These poems flip that script: the joke's on him."