Incantations Poems

Out of grief, upheaval, derision, disappointment, and change of all kinds-from the intimate to the mythic-Incantations both admonishes and rails. Darnell Arnoult’s evocative collection unleashes frustration and longing in tongues of fire. And while her poems walk heaven’s blues home in a rush of images, real and imagined, they point to an undergirding optimism and path toward healing and hope where joy lies “dazed and waiting.” The spells cast here are beyond magic, beyond human-no less than urgent, no more than what’s necessary to begin again.Praise for Incantations by Darnell Arnoult:Darnell Arnoult has written some of the South’s most memorable poems of the past quarter-century, and Incantations is her most evocative and mysterious book. This collection shimmers and sparks with an electricity I hear in “that thin, wild mercury sound, metallic and gold and whatever that conjures up” that Bob Dylan envisioned. Arnoult offers strange and beautiful images steeped in sonic and metaphorical richness: “Sun rhythms over a howling serpent telling / you rain is long gone and her children, / light as Venus and drunk as owls, / flood judgment.” These glorious poems manage to be both sharp-edged and lush, a parabolic book of paradoxes, and as “Morning” reminds us, “Glory talks in a hard language.” Listen. Let the widening spell of Incantations transport you through dark portals and back into the welcome and needed light.–Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place