Poems, essays, and prompts to sing a new world into being–Queer
& BIPOC perspectives on poetry as an insurgent ritual for
manifesting liberation and reclaiming power.
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.