Unlikely Books and Marc Vincenz present the follow-up to A Brief Conversation with Consciousness, Beautiful Rush, and Gods of a Ransacked Century: Spells for the Wicked! Check out this dynamic tome of layered poetry, working ecology, myth, and existentialism into a unique and powerful blend.
Check out what people are saying about Spells for the Wicked:
Marc Vincenz’s poetry collection, Spells for the Wicked is a verbal extravaganza and poetic grimoire, travelling widely across galaxies and into the intricacies of imagination. It invokes quixotic, sometimes mysterious notions associated with human belief and understanding. It revels in a plethora of bewitching narratives, incantations and contemporary reimaginings of history as it riffs suggestively and subversively on connections between the modern world, ancient cultures and philosophical traditions. Characterised by a remarkable sonic playfulness, Spells for the Wicked invites the reader to relish language as a series of transformative forays into a unique and quintessentially twenty-first century form of the poetic art.
—Paul Hetherington
The prolific poet, Marc Vincenz, has written a book of spells, not to cast out evil or bring love, but to create his own mythologies of contemporary life, ancient history, and even the beginning of the cosmos. The third poem announces the mystical principle that “Beauty is the birth / of nothing . . . something apportioned / in wide-eyed increments / information, which / by virtue is nothing / more than beauty.” The wolf and fox patrol the hallways. Perhaps to seek order, “We walk the thin plowshares—wobbly, but / with a clearly delineated mythology.” You must remember, of course, to wrap a black thread around your toe to ward off death. “In a liminal fashion,” the hero, Timeon, wishes “to disappear into a hole / or hedgerow” where he scatters salt “from the Roof of the World” in order to enter the Bardo, that space between life and death. The book itself is liminal, joining the actual and the mythical, realism and fantasy. Women heroes include Snakeskin, The Second Daughter, and The Owl Priestess. Overhead, the Y birds bicker. “Ostrogoth wisdom: / solar flares / light the way.” Altogether, it’s a great romp through depth charges.
—Paul Hoover
Entering into a Marc Vincenz poem is like climbing through a trapdoor in the ceiling you’d never noticed before. Up here, in the metaphysical, time moves in all directions and civilization’s sugar-rush decline is stalked by lions and picked over by carrion birds. Vincenz’s language is a cabinet of abundance as imagination soars and the cosmos is unriddled, baroquely. Open up this grimoire then, these Spells for the Wicked; incant, behold!
—Helen Ivory
“Obscurity has its tale to tell,” wrote Adrienne Rich, a claim that applies to Marc Vincenz’s wildest book to date (also his wittiest and funniest). Rigorously oblique but not opaque, Spells for the Wicked can’t tame its brilliant eccentricities, a helplessness that proves them all the more authentic: “I hate to be the elephant in the room,/ but the draft horse in me wants to walk /in straight lines, plow a path ahead.” And while the thought-lines in these poems rarely run straight (few imaginations as febrile as Vincenz’s), they dig new channels, in the furrows of our brains and in the soil of our poetry.
— Steven Cramer
