BURN THE WITCH by Aïcha Martine Thiam

Aïcha Martine Thiam’s Burn the Witch is a book-length magic show with a host who knows her tricks. The speaker of these poems is both witch and magician, wielding language like a deck of cards and  convincing us over and over again that what we think is the truth is something else entirely. This entire collection is an incantation, and we are put under this speaker’s spell from the very beginning. What follows is Thiam showing off her ability to warp time and space, the ease with which she revises the experience of the Black woman right before our eyes. Thiam writes, “Saying goes, when you let people wound you, you are actually in control of the bruise…another trick of light,” and the speaker of these poems relies on the magical and superstitious to regain control of traumatic histories. And even in her vulnerable moments, even when the pain becomes too much, Thiam’s speaker casts another spell, says “I am a woman who can hold it together hold it together / hold it together” until the reader is mouthing along, until we say it enough to believe it.

–Taylor Byas, Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus, and author of BLOODWARM and I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

Aïcha Martine Thiam’s Burn the Witch is an incantation, a furtive glance, a maximalist reframing of a speaker that defies limitations. Like all strong witches, Thiam understands the difficult world in a profound way — with a firm grasp on intuition’s tenets and a steady gaze towards the contours beyond human perception, national histories, and personal trauma. She’ll swallow cyclones, she’ll magic a little world that shuns. Watch yourself, reader. Do not undervalue what plants in these deep, solitary woods. In this brilliant book, Thiam constructs “a Universe unto herself” amid the constant threat of disappearance, of “conditional bullet talk,” of the violence of everyday life as a Black woman. If you know what’s good for you, you’d better start listening.

—Jessica Q. Stark, Poetry Editor for AGNI, Comics Editor for Honey Literary and author of INNANET, Savage Pageant and Buffalo Girl and more