call the necromancer
by leia penina wilson
ISBN 978-1-7347662-3-3
Designed, printed, and assembled by Carrion Bloom Books in SLC, UT in 2022
Poetry, hand-bound in long stitch, 44 pages
$20 - $31 (choose your price)
This edition of 50 has a cover with a blind-embossed impression on the title -- the edges of this impression are individually chalked with white charcoal and may vary from copy to copy. The chalk and spell will fade over time.
The poems in this chapbook will be published -- even wider, even weirder -- in a full-length book of poetry by Action Books in 2025.
The author and editors thank you for your support.
15% of the sale of this physical run will be donated to the National Network of Abortions (NNAF) -- at any price level ($20, $24, and $31).
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"first make our enemy into a name
a rune no inpersonpink only i wish
only hadn’t i run out of
what—what do you call these feelings
omg i’ve run out of feelings"
Praise for the book:
"If onomatopoeia has an ungulated echo or a compelling sonic
personality it would lie its sonic paws on the breast of leia penina wilson’s
call
the necromancer
and dance the unabbreviated wolves of words away into Charon,
Styx, Theseus, or impending “fatal excellence.” wilson’s world is wildly sonorous
and is always ready, “when no one practices magic the ecstasy & the debris
rush in,” to license a tongue to revel its obsession.."
- Vi Khi Nao, author of Sheep Machine
"leia penina wilson’s call the necromancer is the best and most beautiful part of a hex: not the part that lodges bad luck in the life of another, but the part that releases and redeems the life of the one empowered to cast it. It is effervescent, percussive—the exclamation points are like spirits balancing on crystal balls or disembodied heads—retributive, blood-curing, and feels like the marrow incantation of poetry.."
- Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall
"This book is so all at once. Like the Jan van de Velde engraving to which its endpapers allude, it is a kind of hot metal keyhole view on someone mid-magic, mid-conjuring, mid-grief, mid-process. It is in the rhythm of riding a horse through the woods–tinkering with a Romantic trope but also all done up in the gaudy timelessness of Romanticism: like if Wuthering Heights were a CW show with a soundtrack of heavy metal and Neil Young. It’s got a psychopomp as a “batlike gangster” who ushers in the new feeling of self after a loss (“Fuck i miss filth”)."But also it’s all twisted up in how feeling works and what exactly the self is up to, most of the time: “This endlessly stupid human need to feel,” “I know no feelings only deathstyles,” “The living/ so jekyll so minuscule” . . .
The speaker is thinking through words as hinges for simultaneous collision and bifurcation.
She’s wondering about deconstruction and the utter vileness of whiteness in poetics.
She’s deliciously draining a nightingale.
She drags Keats and so many others (like Alice and Medea and Sylvia Plath and the song “Tainted Love”) through the woods, creating almost a burning Wall of Sound, a necromanced situation wherein we’ll “speak fancy or [we]’ll lose/ [her] favor.”
I absolutely love leia penina wilson’s version of the world.
- Olivia Cronk, author of Womonster
About the author
leia penina wilson is a Samoan poet, weaver, queer, forest hag, praying mantis. when she’s not playing Magic the Gathering, video games, or baking, she reads YA and trashy paranormal romance novels. her work dwells in cunt poetics, hybridity, witchcraft, and other decolonial practices.