Jessica Drake-Thomas’ Bad Omens is on my list of best books for the year. This poetry collection is steeped in mystery and folklore, with a dash of mythology and a hint of history. In other words, Drake-Thomas has managed to fit all of my favorite themes into her book. This is a very late posting on my blog as I read and reviewed this back in February. Since then I have read it twice more, and I love it even more than before.

She opens this collection with an audience with a soothsayer: “Speak to me/as if I’m covered in blood…or don’t speak/ at all. /Bring me a gift–/ mouthful of sour cherries, /black toad, /smooth rune-stones. / In return, / the knowledge / you’ve been denied…” She will guide you, give you knowledge, and with that knowledge the power you desire, you deserve. We walk with a dark goddess lamenting the light she has lost and praise Eve’s daring and the gifts she gave her daughters.

Readers walk the path generations of witches have traversed communing with nature and night; we are women, we are phoenixes, we are sirens and the weak-minded our prey. We practice alchemy in a bath perfumed by belladonna, serenaded by seabirds; later we will run with wolves. Drake-Thomas weaves mythology with Tarot on a journey to free herself from the oppression of one considered good because he was God-fearing; when a woman is called a witch, consider, who was the wicked one?

My favorite poem in her collection, The Empress Reversed, alludes to two things I love: the television show Penny Dreadful, and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (I will share the full poem at the end of this post, it’s so evocative). And this exquisite line from Ophiophagy: “I may be asleep when/ disaster arrives, but/ I’ll dream of dandelion pie & stars” (I have been working on a collection of golden shovel poems inspired by women writers, and I have included this line. There is magic in these words.)

In La Fee Verte a Tarot reader gives the narrator the Tower, a powerful card, one to be wary of, and she falls into a Wonderland of absinthe and arsenic, dancing faeries glowing with radium. In her book, Death comes on his pale horse and the Goddess waits at the crossroads–which will you choose?

I am absolutely in love with this book (in case you couldn’t tell). I am eagerly awaiting what magick Jessica Drake-Thomas conjures in her next book. This was an ARC given by Querencia Press and I am so grateful that they sent it. As promised, below, The Empress Reversed, by Jessica Drake-Thomas, from Bad Omens.

The Empress Reversed 

There’s a brisk trade for photographs of dead women*, 

you know— 

men like their women silent, passive. 

Weak, soft as a kitten. 

They cannot stand a mad woman, 

who speaks in tongues, 

knows secrets. 

A woman is only as good 

as those she trusts. 

Her blue lips gape— 

spiders come crawling 

out of her mouth 

her eyes go black. 

She lifts up off her feet, 

head thrown back. 

There’s a demon beneath her skin, 

scratching to get loose. 

Like this pattern she’s dragging her nails down— 

yellow wallpaper, purple orchids, 

death cap mushrooms, 

a woman slipping out 

of her body, her prison. 

Have you seen the signs? They’re in 

patterns that birds make in the sky, 

footprints marking the road she took, 

veins in leaves, the way the cards fall, 

how the moon occludes itself. 

Who is this? Who’s it from? 

The cold woman, with eyes of blue flame. 

The prints end, the trail runs dry. 

Your questions do not. 

*Penny Dreadful, Season One, Episode Seven