Fixed earth: wild animals, practical witchcraft, poetry

Rathore’s poem ‘Alison Device (1594-1612), named for a Pendle witch, is a beautiful meditation on mortality and desire.

Mutable water: liminality, precarity, recklessness

Emma Cline’s novel The Guest is a thriller where nothing much happens. The tension and dread are evoked from the seemingly impossible drama of trying to live from moment to moment.

Fixed air: hacking, repurposing systems, linguistic play

Berg’s collection offers this small hope, this tiny act of witchcraft in a collection that both reproduces and interrogates patriarchal violence and its necrotizing effect.

Fixed air: revelation, visions, futures

These everyday objects take on a plastic significance, the ashtray is a repository for waste, and the mingling of the ash with the ‘pink seat’ suggests an uneasy disruption of categories.

Mutable fire: film screens, spectrality, excess

‘You want to pee in a red hood you want to lock yourself inside the house. You want to sleep with the wolf. You want to turn on the oven.’

Mutable fire: emergencies, cinematic glimmers, glowworms

The dark spools forward and I grip the branch. I lunge into the deep mud and my holy communion dress is ratted at the hem.

Fixed water: unfinished business, deep emotions, divination

We record this by leaving the work unfinished and unresolved. The absence is a space for grief.

Fixed water: death, mourning, transformation

Her body is a miracle in the house. Copper sulphite leaks from her. The sink blooms with a little mould, a little sparkle.

Cardinal air: lightning knowledge, shock of awareness, excitement, fear.

The restless prickle of adolescent longing led Izzy beyond the invisible boundaries of the forest, and into a drinking game that had bloody consequences.

Fixed fire: incandescence, blue flame, eerie glow

As anyone who watches crime television might already know, luminol is a substance that emits an eerie glow when it comes in contact with human blood.

Fixed fire: the gurlesque, luminol margaritas, glow-in-the-dark rosaries

shrines, quinceañera parties, holy communions, and seances of this book are all stained luminescent blue.