Inside Every Dream, A Raging Sea by Liz Worth is an entrancing collection of poems that capture the limbo of living between worlds—vigil and sleep, reality and dream, past and present—with a third eye on life’s inherent magic. Worth’s poems give space and coherence, too, to the various spirits and ghosts, ancestral and otherwise, that infiltrate our days and alienate us from our routines. Here is a kind of Book of Shadows, limning darkness and despair as well as mystery and miraculous synchronicity. Memories fold and unfold, haunting the edges of daily life—a present in which the speaker can’t help but “weep for all we are” (“Afterimage”). If there is a prophetic voice, its power emerges in its ability to interpret, intuit, and ultimately inspire a world of less unfortunate events—where, say, folks pay their respects at Nature’s readymade altar (the opposite of destruction) and do not run from suffering, whether their own or another’s.

What’s in the cards for the world will depend on our “eyes find[ing] the bend of the globe / on which all matters of the future rest” (“The Becoming”). This bending might require that we divest from all promises of a fairytale ending, given this is a “future cut with fires” (“A Future Cut With Fires”). As such, we need a new storyline: one that reckons with death being all around us, death as the shadow around all life. As Worth writes in “Black Annis”: “Nothing / here stays mended. Signs of a curse, surely.” Thankfully, “writing is a ritual” (“Flesh from Bone”) that might help us out of history’s hex(es). For “Language dies, too, you know. If we don’t keep / our words alive, they leave” (“Etymology”). To use language is to conjure worlds, to envision the real in the ethereal and vice-versa.

To read this book—which I suggest be read by “the crackle of lit candlewicks” (“Private Light”)—is to revitalize the spirit subsumed within the dense trunks of the body we carry through the dark woods of life, “under old mud and the ache of time” (“Melt”). Worth’s poetics, braided thematically with allusions to witchcraft and folk medicine, considers the uncanny ways voices of the past impose on the present, rupture the promises we make to ourselves, and subvert our expectations of the future. Without a magic formula for salvation, without affirmations or strategies to radically save the raging world, readers come to understand that we are all in this together—transient life, full of turmoil and grief, chiaroscuro. The poet’s words emerge from this liminal space to shine light on “something beyond what’s been in front of [us] all along” (“Young Fox”). A professional tarot reader in her own right, Worth’s poems shift in shape, mystify as they clarify, asking for—and offering—guidance for readers looking to break on through to the other side. I predict good things for this book, and highly recommend readers leave their fates to Worth’s divinations, spells that “show [us] how to regain what’s been lost” (“Glamour Spells”) and inspire “the self [we] can still become” (“Pallid Flowers”).