Despite the sudden success of Juno Beach poet Spencer Reece, he continues to live the same way, keeping a day job and a modest life. In June of 2003, the New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn devoted the entire back page of the magazine's fiction issue to the title poem of Reece's collection. In the following years, Reece won several prestigious poetry prizes, read at the Library of Congress and at book fairs in Los Angeles and Texas, and won grants from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Last year Houghton Mifflin Co., published Reece's first book of poems titled, The Clerk's Tale.The son of a wealthy Minnesota physician, Reece studied at Bowdoin College and Wesleyan University. He later earned a master's degree in English Renaissance poetry in York, England, and in 1990 received a master's degree in theology from the Harvard School of Divinity. After completing his education, Reece returned to Minnesota to live with his family, but quickly discovered that things had changed since he had left. His parents were bankrupt and unwilling to accept their son's sexual preferences, which also led to an estranged relationship between Reece and his younger brother. After committing himself to a mental hospital in 1994, Reece needed a job, so he began working at a Brooks Brothers in the Mall just outside Minneapolis. Reece transferred to the Palm Beach store in 1998, and four years later became the assistant manager.Reece now 41 had this to say about poetry, "Poetry is meditative, and requires an amount of silence". Anyone who has a professional career shared by a passion for poetry knows the life of a poet has never been easy. In a society of M.T.V. and Reality T.V. there are very few who read, and even fewer still who read verse. Let's face it poetry doesn't pay. However, Reece continues to keep the day job because Brooks Brothers does -- about $30,000 a year for an assistant manager.Reece had these earnest words to say about balancing his lives as poet and working stiff, "I need my job," adding, "It taught me about life, to be a team player, to work with others. I know it seems pedestrian. But it suits me." Yet managing the store among the shelves of precisely folded dress shirts, in the daily routine required of a Brooks Brothers manager, Spencer Reece has found he is happy where he is, being of service and working with others.