As a little girl, I was that kid mashing up plants I found in the garden to make potions and using marbles as crystal balls. My mom, always eager to encourage my interests, even bought me a pocket book of spells from Barnes & Noble. But then a rumor spread around my very conservative, very Christian town that I was a witch. My best friend at the time pulled me aside in school one day to ask in hushed tones, concern and worry etched across her face, if it was true.

I wish I could say I had the moxie back then to proudly confirm their suspicions. Instead, I tucked that side of myself away in the broom closet, channeling my spooky energy into more acceptable outlets like Halloween and scary movies. It wasn’t until the year after I graduated college when I was gifted a tarot deck that I began opening myself back up to witchcraft. And it was another six years until I finally came out of that broom closet and declared myself a witch.

While writing my debut poetry book, I was thinking a lot about the figure of the witch and the ways in which she’s been identified (and so often maligned) in our culture. To me, the witch is the perfect symbol for anyone who’s been persecuted for existing outside the norm—whether because they refuse to uphold the role society dictates for them or because their traditions, language, clothing, body, art, lifestyle buck against convention. I wrote To Love a Fierceness so Bright in response to this, using the witch—as well as many other prominent female figures from history and religion—to explore themes of womanhood, identity, and reclamation. My poems wrestle with the names we’re given, the roles we reject, and the power in re-authoring our own stories.

The 7 poetry books you’ll find below all blur the line between poem and incantation. They resist the mainstream and carve out a space for the mystical, the feral, and the sacred on their own terms. Whether you identify as a witch, resonate with her archetype, or just want something a little spooky to read this Samhain, this list of witchy poetry books is the perfect familiar. 

The Witch, A Play by Thera Webb 

Thera Webb’s The Witch, A Play may open with a “Cast List,” but between its pages you’ll uncover a feverish collection of sparse, evocative poems told through the voices of characters we think we know: the Mother, the Beast, the Children, the Hero, and the eponymous Witch. But don’t let these familiar fairytale archetypes shape how you see them here. In Webb’s hands, the Mother understands that all lions have human faces; the Children arrive bleeding and already covered in the scars of their ancestors; the Hero is lost; the Beast is more prophet than monster; and the Witch just wants to be left alone. Like truths divined from a crystal ball, these poems speak to the wildness, the unknowable, the hunger, the hurt, and the need for resolution within all of us while offering no clear allegory or lesson learned. Like the archetypes themselves, Webb’s poetry shimmers in a liminal, dreamlike space that is both window and mirror.

Witch Wife by Kiki Petrosino 

There is sorcery at work in Kiki Petrosino’s Witch Wife, which delves deep into what it means to live in a body, especially a Black, female body. Through traditional and invented poetic forms, Petrosino weaves together memories, personal histories, myths, and dreams into an incantation to summon the dead and conjure the self. Filled with magical tokens and talismans, these poems explore all stages of womanhood—from the darkly magical times of childhood to the emergence of self in young adulthood, and its quiet erosion in marriage and motherhood. Petrosino’s writing is lyrical and expansive, blunt and concise, and faces issues of generational trauma, body shaming, and cultural violence to “wrangle life from the dirt.” These poems are not for the faint of heart. But for those willing to face the dark, Witch Wife offers light and the knowledge that you are not alone. 

All Things Holy and Heathen by Chelsea C. Jackson

This one’s for the eco-political witches. Infused with verve and heart, the electrifying poems within Chelsea C. Jackson’s All Things Holy and Heathen will ignite the pyre of resistance inside you. Broken into four sections—Life, Death, Violence, and Resurrection—Jackson’s searing verse is both an attack on man-wrought violence and an invocation for us to reconnect with the earth that birthed us before it’s too late. For Jackson, this means beginning at the beginning, by rewriting the Christian myth of creation. In her telling, Eve is not a sinful creature, but a holy, natural being. It is mankind, the so-called “divinely chosen, [who has] breathed hot air onto glaciers / bled oil into oceans / burned holes into the heavens.” But Jackson knows the antidote. If we are to heal Gaia, we must “open [our] palms to what the sediment is saying”—we must commune with nature, follow our intuition, and remember the beauty and knowledge inherent within every body.  

fox woman get out! by India Lena González

Woe to any man who tries to control this ferocious witch. With a freedom and fierceness that won’t be cowed, India Lena González’s fox woman get out! demands attention. Like a true witch, she bucks convention, letting these poems rage in all caps, simmer in fractured lines, and call across time in long, sweeping verses. The wanton abandon and feral power of these poems evokes skyclad witches dancing around a bonfire, howling at the full moon. González struggles to pin down her mixed identity in a world that glorifies whiteness and conformity. But like the poems themselves, González is expansive. With deep heartache and profound insight, González carves her indelible image onto the page. In poem after poem, she asserts herself as something larger, deeper, wilder than the structures of white society have laid out. She reveals herself to possess a truer knowledge of self and humanity, which she prophesizes like the Oracle of Delphi. This one’s for the witches who refuse to be silenced or forgotten.

Rose Quartz by Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe 

Any good witch knows that healing is one of the oldest forms of the craft. In Rose Quartz, Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe channels that power into the page. Under her pen, the past and present exist simultaneously—a sensation that is heightened by the absence of any punctuation. These poems, like time, are fluid, shifting, unstable. Here, the everyday is transformed into something magical, though it is a dangerous magic that could wound as easily as it heals. Yet healing is what LaPointe seeks—through color magic, tarot cards, herbs, crystals, moon water, salt baths, and even flying ointment. In these “spells of survival” she attempts to mend the wounds of her inner child, the scars of ancestral trauma, and the violence done to her body, while confronting the contradictions born of her Native American heritage, American culture, and the narrow expectations of womanhood. “Sometimes,” LaPointe writes, “to remember a wound is the way of healing.” And special shoutout to Fumi Mini Nakamura on the bewitching cover art!

Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales by Hannah V Warren 

If you’re in the mood for something darker, Hannah V Warren’s Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales delivers. In Warren’s words, this book is “gruesome and seductive.” Here you’ll find ghosts and skeletons, insects and rotting things, and an entire section devoted to apocalypse poems. Warren explores the unnaturalness of life, the monstrousness of our bodies, and the way those bodies continue to fracture and influence the earth’s story after death. Like a true necromancer, she divines meaning from remains, whether she’s stealing bones from the dinosaur exhibit at the Natural History Museum or reckoning with the South’s violent history. There’s something Frankensteinian in the way these poems are stitched together, an ongoing attempt to reanimate flesh in a decaying world. In the end, we’re left to confront and “live with the horrors of our own bodies.”

Loba by Diane di Prima

No list of witchy poetry is complete without Diane di Prima’s seminal work, Loba. This epic poem spans the ages as it conjures up the wolf goddess, drawing on female figures from historical and religious texts, as well as classic literature. She is Loba, but she is also Athena, Isis, Aphrodite, Nut, and Inanna. She is Eve and Lilith; Guinevere and Morgan le Faye; Helen of Troy and Mary Magdalene. In this way, Loba marks herself as ever-present and eternal. She is not one divine female, but all divine females that have been or ever will be. Di Prima’s goddess will hunt you down in the pages of this book, patiently following you “like some / big, rangy dog” until you turn to confront her. For those brave enough to do so, you won’t find the kindly mother figure of the patriarchy. More akin to Kali, Loba does not offer a refuge from tears, but what she does offer is protection and fierce loyalty. Loba stands “strong patient / recognizably / goddess. / Protectress / great mystic beast of European forest. / green warrior woman, towering. / kind watchdog I cd / leave the children with.”