Witch
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
Poems merge queer ecopoetics with religious disposition, speaking through a pantheon of mythic figures—from Jesus to Aphrodite—to commune or contend with reality. What emerges is a cumulative awareness of being a physical, energetic body in a fractured world, attempting to heal some part of it while exploring and embracing the gray areas of identity and ambiguity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this accomplished debut, Matthews frames the occult as a source of power and agency for historically marginalized groups, the LGBTQ community foremost among them. "The priests went away nodding/ that an amputated arm was a failure," he writes in the opening poem. As the book unfolds, witchcraft, ritual, and occult texts become a rich source of alternate histories, which reveal the subjective definitions of the sacred. "Each chakra described with a different number of petals/ p dale; p d : faggot," he writes, challenging the power structures dictating definitions of holiness. Though gracefully unified by these thematic concerns, the book takes a capacious approach to form, placing literary tradition in conversation with more experimental gestures and juxtaposing unusual typography alongside tercets. He writes in "The Tranny Ballet": "I bent/ around/ my sister,// gazing towards an orbit and following. The audience/ were too much to think about, I thought, and turned my attention/ to smaller flashes." "I am hot in this rage where I have been/Transformed," he writes in "Crown and Crowning." These formally dexterous poems offer a dynamic approach to the exploration of identity and mysticism.
