About the Book
Our lives are full of personal legend. Trivial details can feel fated, weighted with meaning. What happens when we start to see the words we speak as spells? Where do the lines of ritual, magic, and daily life blur? Inspired by Worth's professional tarot reading, these poems explore the thin veil between them and suggest it barely exists at all.
Confessional stories blend with the abstract and the occult, probing uncomfortable truths about age, regret, and shifting identity that emerge with the passing of time. Worth deftly shares the loss that comes from inadvertently discarding parts of ourselves-including our self-perception-or realizing our lives are different than we previously envisioned. We can see the world as a series of places haunted with our own memories.
Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea elevates the everyday, celebrating memory as individual folklore. These poems offer a way into the interconnected elements of our lives and the world around us, embodying the state of possibility and openness we are all searching for.
About the Author :
LIZ WORTH is a poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer. She is a two-time nominee for the ReLit Award for Poetry for her books The Truth Is Told Better This Way and No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol. Her first book, Treat Me Like Dirt, was the first of its kind to provide an in-depth history of Southern Ontario's first wave punk movement. Her other works also include Amphetamine Heart, PostApoc, and The Mouth is a Coven. Her writing has appeared in Chatelaine, FLARE, Prism, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and Broken Pencil, among others. Liz is a professional tarot reader and lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
Review :
"Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea, poems by Liz Worth, boldly confronts aging, memory, the passage of time: these things that we--women in particular--are taught to fight against, to deny; but as Worth writes, 'I didn't come all this way to write books my mother would like.' The poems in this collection challenge us to dive a little deeper, swim a little further, into the raging sea that lies beneath." --Heather Babcock, Five Star Review
"On a personal level, Inside Every Dream, A Raging Sea felt like a mood ring of my life, vocalizing so much of what I'm thinking and feeling right now, and have been feeling for so long... How marvellous to read these poems that are so succinct, so on point and so beautifully moving." --Lisa de Nikolits, A Turn of Phrase Substack
"Worth writes us through an experiential landscape, hoping in and out of experiences, mixing them it with spiritualism and observances. Time passes for the speaker--page by page--and we are transported through the portals of heartache, longing and healing." --Toni Hornes Sullivan, Heavy Feather Review
"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." --Adebe DeRango-Adem, Arc Poetry
"Inside Every Dream, A Raging Sea by Liz Worth is a standout in contemporary horror poetry" --Cemetery Dance
"Don't mess with the Old Magic if you aren't willing to face your own shadow. The poems in Liz Worth's poignant new collection, Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea, do the real work of closely observing the discomfort that arrives in the aftermath of desire. The voice of these poems speaks as both gardener and guardian--it tends to, it fends off. 'Just imagine me as a woman / in a white dress, lightning in her hair.' Vulnerable, honest, steely, and steeped in a medicine made from bitter herbs, these poems are a reminder that every dream, if fully followed, eventually leads into a conversation with death. These meditations on loss and regret transform through their very refusal to look away or to contort into false promise. At the end of the spell, the voice returns to the earth and a pale bloom opens in its wake." --Damian Rogers, author of An Alphabet for Joanna
"Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea is a haunted house, a hurricane, a rotting tree. These poems feel ancient and elemental, almost like words we shouldn't be reading but can't walk away from. Beware of the spell they weave...and the ghosts that follow." --Stephanie M. Wytovich, author of On the Subject of Blackberries.
"'My first prophecy was a poem, ' writes Liz Worth, conjuring the self in a state where the past portends an uncertain future. At this crossroads, personal experience informs universal truth, and Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea unfolds like a spell cast to blur the line between legerdemain and the slow burn of daily life. A haunting, illusory read." --Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors
"Told with a wink and a sly smile, Worth's deliciously dark and defiant poetry crawls under one's skin and stays there. The characters in The Truth is Told Better This Way dance barefoot on dirty club floors, pee with the door open and whisper their hard-won truth into subway payphones. Like an unforgotten lover whom you just can't shake, the poems in this collection will keep you up at night." --Heather Babcock, author of Of Being Underground and Moving Backwards "Liz Worth has never been darker. In this new collection she transforms her craft of confessional writing into a filthy and flourishing fantasia; a witch's brew of the most poetic magicks." --dalton derkson "Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea unfolds like a spell cast to blur the line between legerdemain and the slow burn of daily life. A haunting, illusory read."
--Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors
IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Winner in Mystery/Thriller Category
"'My first prophecy was a poem, ' writes Liz Worth, conjuring the self in a state where the past portends an uncertain future. At this crossroads, personal experience informs universal truth, and Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea unfolds like a spell cast to blur the line between legerdemain and the slow burn of daily life. A haunting, illusory read." --Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors
