Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea by Liz Worth

Our lives are full of personal legend. Trivial details can feel fated, weighted with meaning. What happens when we start to see the words we speak as spells? Where do the lines of ritual, magic, and daily life blur? Inspired by Worth’s professional tarot reading, these poems explore the thin veil between them and suggest it barely exists at all.

Confessional stories blend with the abstract and the occult, probing uncomfortable truths about age, regret, and shifting identity that emerge with the passing of time. Worth deftly shares the loss that comes from inadvertently discarding parts of ourselves—including our self-perception—or realizing our lives are different than we previously envisioned. We can see the world as a series of places haunted with our own memories.

Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea elevates the everyday, celebrating memory as individual folklore. These poems offer a way into the interconnected elements of our lives and the world around us, embodying the state of possibility and openness we are all searching for.

Praise for Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea

“‘My first prophecy was a poem,’ writes Liz Worth, conjuring the self in a state where the past portends an uncertain future. At this crossroads, personal experience informs universal truth, and Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea unfolds like a spell cast to blur the line between legerdemain and the slow burn of daily life. A haunting, illusory read.” —Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors

“Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea is a haunted house, a hurricane, a rotting tree. These poems feel ancient and elemental, almost like words we shouldn’t be reading but can’t walk away from. Beware of the spell they weave…and the ghosts that follow.” —Stephanie M. Wytovich, author of On the Subject of Blackberries

“Don’t mess with the Old Magic if you aren’t willing to face your own shadow. The poems in Liz Worth’s poignant new collection, Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea, do the real work of closely observing the discomfort that arrives in the aftermath of desire. The voice of these poems speaks as both gardener and guardian—it tends to, it fends off. ‘Just imagine me as a woman / in a white dress, lightning in her hair.’ Vulnerable, honest, steely, and steeped in a medicine made from bitter herbs, these poems are a reminder that every dream, if fully followed, eventually leads into a conversation with death. These meditations on loss and regret transform through their very refusal to look away or to contort into false promise. At the end of the spell, the voice returns to the earth and a pale bloom opens in its wake.” —Damian Rogers, author of An Alphabet for Joanna

Press Coverage

Poetry, Spells, and Tarot: Author Interview Series: Inside Every Dream, A Raging Sea by Liz Worth —Stephanie Wytovich’s Substack

Most Anticipated: Our Fall 2024 Poetry Preview —49th Shelf

44 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in fall 2024 —CBC Books

“Inside Every Dream, A Raging Sea by Liz Worth is a collection of dark poetry, poetry that is both haunting and haunted. There are ghosts in these poems, dark spirits that dwell in the shadows. They cloak themselves in the images of a deep magic, one of the woods and flowers and moss, and reveal themselves in Worth’s ethereal language… Inside Every Dream, A Raging Sea is a standout in contemporary horror poetry and should be on the shelf of anyone interested in seeing where that subgenre of horror can be expanded.” —Joshua Gage, Cemetary Dance

Hamilton Reads: An Interview with Liz Worth —Jessica Rose, Hamilton City Magazine

Liz Worth Explores a Poetic Life and the Mysteries and Truths That Abound in Her New Collection, Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea —Open Book

Homegrown 2.0: Even More Locally Produced Reads, with Liz Worth —All Lit Up

Episode 386 – Inside Every Poem a Raging Sea of Writerly Advice with Liz Worth —Stark Reflections podcast

E418 with Liz Worth, author of Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea —Get Lit podcast, with host Jamie Tennant

“Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea, poems by Liz Worth, boldly confronts aging, memory, the passage of time: these things that we—women in particular—are taught to fight against, to deny; but as Worth writes, ‘I didn’t come all this way to write books my mother would like.’ The poems in this collection challenge us to dive a little deeper, swim a little further, into the raging sea that lies beneath.” —Heather Babcock, five star review