| Author/Contributor(s): | Beyer, Tamiko; Hemphill, Destiny; White, Lisbeth |
| Publisher: | North Atlantic Books |
| Date: | 05/16/2023 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Condition: | NEW |
Written for poets, spellcasters, and social justice witches, Poetry as Spellcasting reveals the ways poetry and ritual can, together, move us toward justice and transformation. It asks: If ritualized violence upholds white supremacy, what ritualized acts of liberation can be activated to subvert and reclaim power?
In essays from a diverse group of contributing poets, organizers, and ritual artists, Poetry as Spellcasting helps readers explore, play, and deepen their creativity and intuition as integral tools for self- and communal healing and social change. Each section opens with a poem and includes prompts that invite the reader to engage more deeply with:
- Portals of Inheritance: Ancestral Teachings, Possible Futures opens portals to messages from ancestors and for survival
- Languages of Liberation, Disruption, and Magic explores how poetry and spellcasting allow us to enter into and harness language in active, heightened ways that both reflect reality and manifest alternatives.
- Invoking Radical Imagination leans into the incantatory possibilities of poetry as prayer and poetry as enchantment.
- Sacred Practices: Rituals of Repair and Revision explores writing as ritual, ritual as practice, and practice as doing, drawing connections between the creative practices of poetry and spellwork.
- Lighting Fires, Breaking Chains focuses on the explicitly magical and political nature of poetry as spellcasting.
- Elemental Ecologies, Spiritual Technologies wrestles with concepts of home, colonization, and belonging
Both poetry and occult studies have been historically dominated by white, cishet writers; here, Poetry as Spellcasting reclaims the centrality of queer and BIPOC voices in poetry, magic, and liberatory spellwork.