Black Lawrence Press, 2022
 
“ ‘Who owns / this world’? Raena Shirali has written a precise sensory archive of the rejection of wisdom and the rejection of feeling, and this act of mourning drives her verse into the very magical acts its women are persecuted for— and I should warn you that as such it is very, very beautiful. We seem to fear beauty, at least lately, on this planet. Shirali’s poetics find that beyond the historicization and theory of witchcraft, from one culture into the next, and beyond the fundamental dignity of bearing witness, there is something uncanny, even supernatural, that becomes achievable by approaching the truth— the facts— somehow femininely. These poems feel impelled by Justice but are not merely pious: they are sensuous, precise, they move me to face my own wounds, move me closer to life, they draw the living and the dead, the crime and the punishment, the seduction and its consequences into a space through which I seem to see, glimmering, beckoning—another, a truer, way to be. A marvelous and important book.”
 
-Ariana Reines, author of A Sand Book