“Darnell Arnoult has written some of the South’s most memorable poems of the past quarter-century, and INCANTATIONS is her most evocative and mysterious book. This collection shimmers and sparks with an electricity I hear in ‘that thin, wild mercury sound, metallic and gold and whatever that conjures up’ that Bob Dylan envisioned. Arnoult offers strange and beautiful images steeped in sonic and metaphorical richness: ‘Sun rhythms over a howling serpent telling / you rain is long gone and her children, / light as Venus and drunk as owls, / flood judgment.’ These glorious poems manage to be both sharp-edged and lush, a parabolic book of paradoxes, and as ‘Morning’ reminds us, ‘Glory talks in a hard language.’ Listen. Let the widening spell of Incantations transport you through dark portals and back into the welcome and needed light.”

“INCANTATIONS is both tender and alive with the rawness, exactness, and complexities of loss and replenishment. In this searing new collection, Darnell Arnoult constructs intricate emotional landscapes where love is remembered; rendering a precise and deliberate understanding of how to guide us all to ‘breathe in the traveling music.’”

“Darnell Arnoult’s INCANTATIONS is not only a spell of immense beauty but a testament to how language invents us, changes us. For those who listen, these poems unlock a nearly unnameable ‘other world,’ a world made possible by this poet’s singular ability to make it, a world where ‘[l]ife / can still be found reaching up / from the dead.’ This book is magic in the hands, a guide, a trail where ‘mercy glows in the steel craters / of each face of nothing and something.’”

“Darnell Arnoult’s poems of incantation call us from that merciless grave of sorrow to a new ground of hope where ‘life/ can still be found reaching up/ from beneath the feet of the dead.’ For those of us too mired in what is or was to catch a glimmer of what might be, Arnoult offers an answer to her own question: ‘Tell me, Grief, is there no strength?’ Yes, her poems tell us. She has walked the darkened road for us so that we may follow, strengthened by her transliteration of darkness into beauty.”

“These poems boom and sing. They are tooth and balm and gut. They howl into vine-covered chasms and plumb the depths of human sorrow while traversing a landscape of shadow and ghost. There is an impossible frailty to the world Arnoult conjures and an impossible strength. Here are prayers wrought of gravel and old pine, choked weeds and rising water—but also of marsh birds and shimmering grasses. A thunderous collection. Blazing and true.”

“The poems that make up this mesmerizing collection are born from the deepest kinds of grief—grief that comes from worlds burning, from death that dances and glides, from widowhood with its ‘slaughtered and emptied heart.’ Our lives are transient; everything changes form, moving from one existence into another before disappearing into the past. As Arnoult tells us, ‘the human gaze licks itself / with the fascination of sorrow.’ Yet she also rejoices in the curative properties of language, how it can bewitch and rescue us from despair. There is salvation in here, and therein lies the magic in this gorgeous and mysterious collection. These poems truly are incantations—charms for remembrance, for protection and rebirth, and always for love, no matter how it may shift its shape.”

“‘Believe in Death,’ one line begins in Darnell Arnoult’s INCANTATIONS, and then it ends, ‘Believe in Love.’ The two twine in these poems that are chants, spells, what we say in moments of joy and tribulation as we search for ‘fragmented ghosts / in the stars.’ Throughout, Arnoult ‘talks in a hard language’ that creates a ‘blizzard of hallelujahs.’ And readers, you will open this book and be changed. ”

“Darnell Arnoult’s INCANTATIONS is, as the title announces, a marvelous book of musically rich spells, chants to recall and remember lost people and places, to conjure the ‘heaven of haints/ and angels’ and sing songs of praise.”