Inside Every Dream, A Raging Sea by Liz Worth
Book*Hug Press (October 22, 2024)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
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, Toronto Star, and Broken Pencil, among others. Liz is a professional tarot reader and lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Her newest collection is Inside Every Dream, A Raging Sea.
Worth’s poetry is steeped in the magical and the occult. Readers entering this book for the first time will be immediately unsettled by Worth’s ethereal blending of the abstract, the obscure, and the hauntingly concrete. These poems ask the reader to explore, to be caught in the spell of her incantatory language, and to grasp on to the fleeting images that pass by for a sense of bearing and balance. Woe to them, for this is not that sort of book. This book is deliberately dense, layered, and complex, as most magical spells are wont to be. Readers should expect to be challenged by this book, which claws and catches at their attention like thorns and branches in the woods, snagging them and pulling them in different directions than they may want to go.
It would be easy to lump these poems as merely “magical” and leave it at that, but that would be a simplistic reading and interpretation. They are magical, but they are also unsettling, haunting, even dangerous. The magic in these poems is a darker, older magic, one with real costs and consequences. For example, the poem “Melt” begins
We won’t meet where the light gets in.
Instead, we’ll come to each other
under old mud and the ache of time.I dug up your bones while I was looking for the notions I don’t yet have. Out of the marrow crawled twelve tiny beasts, each with dark, blinking eyes. Their hungry mouths nipped at the tips of my fingers and felt their way over inedible surfaces, willing to suck up whatever they could.
This is the sort of language that readers can expect from Worth, a language tainted with organic spells and folk ritual, images and emotions at once contemporary and ancient. Some readers will find difficulty in discerning what is real, what is metaphor, what is light and what is shadow, but that is very much the point of the collection.
Inside Every Dream, A Raging Sea by Liz Worth is a collection of dark poetry, poetry that is both haunting and haunted. There are ghosts in these poems, dark spirits that dwell in the shadows. They cloak themselves in the images of a deep magic, one of the woods and flowers and moss, and reveal themselves in Worth’s ethereal language. This is a dense book, and one that will ask readers to wrestle with some language, but the struggle can be worthwhile. Inside Every Dream, A Raging Sea by Liz Worth is a standout in contemporary horror poetry and should be on the shelf of anyone interested in seeing where that subgenre of horror can be expanded.
