I did not enjoy this book. Read it anyway. It was an act of willpower to pick it up every time, but I did keep picking it up. This is an emotionally demanding text. Every time I pick it up, I find myself full of anxiety, heart beating rapidly, my mind becoming sluggish. I've been devouring books recently, at a rate of about a book a day. I can only manage this book one or two chapters at a time. It is valuable reading, not light reading. If you're truly giving yourself to the text, as merited, I think you'll need to be prepared for this, even if you don't internalize things quite as physically as I do.
Though this varies chapter to chapter, I think the emotional impact of the text sometimes suffers from being overly entrenched in the language of the literati. Given the kind of person I am and the kind of family I come from, I'm very sympathetic to this particular trait and how it might go unnoticed by those who are initiated into the jargon. While those with degrees or equivalent self-education in poetry and social justice theory will probably have no trouble connecting with the text, those without that background will sometimes find themselves bogged down in technical language, interrupting the flow of the ideas the author is attempting to communicate. I'm fairly married to precision, so I choose to interpret this as evidence of the authors as precise rather than pretentious, but I do think it will make the text less welcoming to some.
Those who approach this as an instruction manual will be disappointed. Those who approach it as a window into the minds of thoughtful people will be informed. Those who approach it as a window into themselves will be edified.
I'll be honest, I didn't pick up this book as an instruction manual. I rarely find interest in others' spellcraft; imitation is anathema to the intuitive flow that is my practice. I picked up this book to hear voices unlike my own, to learn about other perspectives, to be a better activist and ally. Because the subject and method are so intimate, I feel I achieved that goal. Because the subject and method are so abstract, it was an incomplete achievement-- incomplete in direct correlation to my own limitations rather than the authors'. I did find it a transformational work. Not the transformation of The Tower but the transformation of The Wheel, not an unmaking/remaking but a waking/walking.
Ultimately, I didn't get the most from the rituals the authors invite the reader to try for themselves (which sometimes felt a bit trite to me). I got the most from my spontaneous responses to the text, what it revived in me, the unfurling of the tight knot of rationality I'd carefully coiled around my endemic madness, that fount from which the most powerful poetry and spellcasting spring. Ultimately, I didn't find this a welcoming invitation to ritual but rather an invitation to recollect (re-collect) a part of myself, a way of being I'd hermetically sealed to keep separate but safe until I was ready to return to it.
If books were medicine -and I believe they can be- I would prescribe this book (especially "Articulating the Undercurrent" by Dominique Matti) for those experiencing disconnection-- from others, from their environment, from divinity, and particularly from themselves.
I feel like Destiny Hemphill speaks movingly to and for this book in "We Ain't Got Long to Stay" when she says:
"So many possibilities for our commitments, so much discernment required.
Stay with me. Please.
Because it's here... It's here at this edge, this possiblity that I'm calling out to you and to your discernment. Earnestly. Right here at this particular crossroads, under increasing surveillance, against the clamor of everydayness that tries to propel us into more of the same-- I'm calling out to you to meet me. Trying to shape the words, the songs, the choreopoems that might seem like a matter of no import to the inattentive. Might seem like just another death chorus. But to you-- it might be a whisper in a register that can only be registered against your skin. And with that heat of breath on your flesh, maybe you know... Maybe you know a surging chorus of aliveness when you feel it? Maybe you recognize the song of liberation gloriously stolen back by kindred? Whispering ...like ...this ...Can you catch it?
Stay with me. Because none of this can stay the same. Breathe with me.
Conspire. We ain't got long to stay here."
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