Book of Spells

The Book of Spells is a collection of poems that believes the world around us is shaped and reshaped by language and that changing our language is a revolutionary act of political and social magic that can replace long-standing destructive agreements with the benignity of loving clarity.

This collection of spells begins by following the tracks of a mythical creature composed of language and blood across an unblemished field of silence. We can never catch this creature, who perhaps is made real by our pursuit of it. There are glimpses-shadows--made into poems in a poor attempt to construct the whole from the parts. This book is a brush dipped in flowers--corpses--schoolyards--the smell of ocean and tears attempting to paint over without erasing the world we’ve constructed as it is.

Gary Lemons has written poetry since 1965. He attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1971 and 1972 and graduated from the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1975. He has studied with some of the great poets of his and any generation, including Norman Dubie, Maxine Kumin, William Stafford, John Berryman, Diane Wakoski, and Donald Justice, none of whom are to blame for what he made of their guidance. He has published eight books of poetry, including The Snake Quartet. Of the many things he’s done to support his writing, he’s most grateful for the time spent reforesting clear-cuts in the PNW where he planted over 500,000 trees. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, between the sea and the mountains, with his life partner Nöle Giulini, to whom this and all his books are dedicated.