The Bard in Retail

As the judge of the Bakeless contest, she had picked "The Clerk's Tale" from 850 submissions. One of the perks of the award, along with a spot at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, is publication by Houghton Mifflin.

Over three months a little more than a year ago, Gluck guided Reece through a series of rewrites. They'd work in the morning for a couple of hours by telephone and then he would drive to work in his Neon.

The ending of the title poem went through 20 versions before everything fell into place with the line "Snow falls like rice." The image provided just the right echo of the marriage theme from Chaucer's original "Clerk's Tale."

Having deemed it ready, Gluck steered the title poem to Alice Quinn, the poetry editor at the New Yorker, who in June gave the poem the entire back page of its Debut Fiction issue.

When Quinn called with the news, Reece had a mouth full of pins as he tried to tailor the seat of a customer's pants.

In her foreword to the book, Gluck writes, "We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making, nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence. Like all genuinely new work, Spencer Reece's compels a reevaluation of the possible."

Analogies fit awkwardly sometimes, but to understand the sudden acclaim Reece has received you might try to imagine an unknown middle-age pitcher arriving in the big leagues, having bypassed all three steps of the minors, only to throw a no-hitter.

His first reading was at the Library of Congress.

He cried in the middle of it. But once the publicity machine got hold of his quirky story, his acclaim began to spread beyond the literary world.

Reporters periodically fly in to interview him. (He is a headline writer's dream: The Bard of Brooks Brothers.) He has accepted an offer from a Palm Beach chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution to speak to them this Christmas.

"It's been very strange," he says.

The Family Circle

"My family," Reece says as he orders iced tea with dinner at a favorite fish house, "was at once fabulous and horrible." He likens them to the Tyrones in Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Boozy, brilliant and corrosive.

His father was a successful pathologist. His mother was a nurse. They met in the early 1960s at a hospital in Hartford, Conn., where they were working.

Reece's grandfather was a chemical engineer who worked with enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project. His mother's great-aunt was a singer at the Metropolitan Opera.

"So one side of the family was focused on art, and the other was involved with the bomb," Reece says.

Wealth made many things possible when he was growing up. He went to boarding school in Minneapolis. One of his most vivid memories from the period was the effeminate young boy who hanged himself to escape the teasing of his classmates.

He attended Bowdoin College in Maine for two years before transferring to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he graduated in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in English literature.

Reece did some writing in college, short stories good enough to win him a coveted spot at Bread Loaf when he was just 19. He dismisses his poetry of that time as "juvenilia," though it won him an award from the Academy of American Poets.

"I was so immature then," he says, audibly wincing at the memory of himself: a clove cigarette-smoking, ultra-bohemian with a haircut somewhere between Laurie Anderson and the lead singer of the Cure. "One of the least favorite versions of myself."

Just before he graduated, he got a call that his cousin John had been killed after a bar fight in St. Augustine, Fla. "They took him to the river and drowned him," Reece said. "They found his body three days later."

Within the year Reece had given up alcohol. "We were on the same path of self-destruction," he said of his cousin.

Leaving Wesleyan, as some of his classmates headed for Broadway or west to Hollywood, Reece flew to England to study Renaissance poetry. He wrote his master's thesis on John Donne and George Herbert and the expression of humility in their poetry.