Rebecca Tamás - Böcker

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them so that it might be remade anew.Contributors include: Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

In this vivid blend of memoir, nature writing and ecological thinking, Rebecca Tamás seeks new answers in old folk ways.Suffering from burn-out and grief both environmental and personal, Tamás sets out on a journey across the UK guided by the Pagan wheel of the year, marking each solstice, equinox and the midpoints between them with a ritual drawn from ancient traditions. From a confrontation with the sharp pains of winter at Samhain in Edinburgh to a giddy experience of collective joy at Padstow's May Day, she finds in these traditional practices electric potential for transforming our relationship to the natural world and the flow of time.Intellectually penetrating and richly lyrical, The Book of Mysteries follows the drumbeat of seasonal ritual towards an immersion in the wild time of the earth. Ecstatic, radical and irreverent, this book is a rallying cry to wrest time away from the structures of work and capital, so as to encounter the life-giving mystery of the natural world.

The poems in the first half of The Ophelia Letters explore the interaction between self and place in ways both strange and loaded with magic: journeying to the Arctic with Werner Herzog, stopping off in Scottish islands and English wildernesses, revealing an electric language of the road that is both expansive and complex. In long title poem Tamás pours this fractured, cut-throat lyricism into the figure of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, attempting to retrieve a silenced female voice from darkness, to let the light in.

WITCH is a strange, visceral and darkly witty debut by a startling new voice in British poetry.Rebecca Tamás reckons with blood and earth, mysticism and the devil, witch trials and the suffragettes, gender and sexuality. At turns lyrical, philosophical and obscene, WITCH evokes the intimate, sensual power of nature and merges it with the revolutionary potential of women’s voices. These are poems as spells — spells against suppression, silence and obedience; hexes that cling to your body like sweat, full of a messy, violent joy, ‘a small, bright, filthy song’.Feminist, ecological and occult, WITCH grabs history and shakes it, demanding: ‘Wake me up when it really gets started’.

In Strangers, Rebecca Tamás explores where the human and nonhuman meet, and why this delicate connection just might be the most important relationship of our times. Tamás’s essays are exhilarating to read in their radical and original exploration of the links between the environmental, the political, the folkloric and the historical.