Poetry as Spellcasting

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.