Pre-order Special: The Witch, A Play in paperback &/OR the full book set throughout January at a discounted rate.

Choose item(s) from the variations drop down. Official release date is March 1st. All pre-orders will mail throughout February.

The Witch, A Play by Thera Webb

Paperback, 88 Pages

Cover art: “Amilec Diffraction” by Jeremy Ferris.

This enchanting tome draws its essence from the pivotal role of women in both the crafting & sharing of fairy tales, tracing a lineage from the kin & companions who gifted the Brothers Grimm their original tales in the early 1800s to the empowering feminist circles, such as the Merseyside Fairy Story Collective, that emerged in the vibrant 1970s. "The Witch, A Play" dances with the archetypes of fairy tales, unfolding through a tapestry of poetic monologues where characters weave their narratives, speaking to & around one another. In the mystical woods, the Mother, the Children, the Hero, & the Beast roam, while the Witch lingers at the fringes, ever the watcher, pondering the choices that shape their fates.

The Witch, A Play Poetic Craft Set

This set includes: Book, Ritual Candle, Broadside, & Drawstring Bag

This set is an immersive poetic experience with complimentary items evocative of Thera Webb’s The Witch, A Play. These items are hand crafted with intention in order to create a ritualistic reading experience as you journey through the woods of this mystical collection.

Atlas of Delight Soy Wax Candle

by Marvel + Moon inspired by the poetry of Thera Webb

Surrender to the witching hour.

Imagine a sanctuary—crisp winter air laced with the intoxicating scent of ivy clinging to frosted stone walls. Cypress needles release their invigorating aroma, mingling with the sweetness of ripe fig, a forbidden fruit hidden within the witch's garden.

Breathe deeply and feel the touch of snow on your skin, a shiver of cold and golden ghosts that awakens the senses. The warmth of ancient woods emanates from the heart of the candle, a primal fire echoing the witch's desires—the glowing coal she craves to soothe the deep wound of a red weight.

Light this candle, let its sensual dance of fragrance transport you to the witch's atlas of delight, and lose yourself in the shadowed depths.

Scent notes: Winter Ivy. Cypress. Fig. Oak. Snow.

Adornments: Cedar Leaf. Mossy Twig.

Candle comes in a 3oz. black tin.

Quotes About the Book

The Witch, A Play brings us to the internal edges of a woods—a strangely mythic, vaguely peopled world in which everything issues from “the purest wilderness…inside / us all.” Delicate, particulate and peculiar, these poems are voiced by characters who tempt but refuse to settle into the allegorical or archetypal modes they call forth. These figures and images grieve an elemental loss and, in their fragments and white space, in their sparse, piercing lightness, seek some restorative relation; Webb writes, “Tremendous suffering and beauty I bring / to the atlas of delight a new river.”

- Cody-Rose Clevidence, author of The Grimace of Eden, Now

"Spare, deadly, lyrical, The Witch, a Play weaves “many forms of divination” to both unsettle and soothe its reader, like a “hot buzz against the skin.” A gorgeous, ghostly book."

- Elaine Kahn, author of Romance or The End

"In The Witch, A Play tremendous suffering and beauty converge as this "atlas of delight" offers an "endless resistance . . . towards grief" while we forever seek that elusive "hole at the bottom of the world." On each page Webb summons a world scrawled in blood and starlight, where divination and desire intertwine like gnarled roots beneath a moonlit forest. This is a feverish dance of archetypes—Mother, Hero, Beast, and Child—all orbiting the enigmatic Witch at its smoldering core."

- Janaka Stucky, author of Ascend Ascend

"Taut & playful & disarmingly affecting, The Witch moves through genres how a spell moves through language, a play in chapters & poems, whose characters announces themselves to the world in gestural soliloquies like incantations of stabbings & glamours & love. The Witch is an intricate & beautiful book that speaks with the honesty of myth."

- Mathias Svalina, author of The Depression: Photographs & Fables

"Short, fierce poems that explode in the imagination, with voices that haunt and linger. There’s nothing to compare The Witch to because I’ve read nothing like it before. The delightful strangeness of Webb’s language feels like it could be from four centuries ago or yesterday, with children raised by wolves who also bite glowsticks and smear their faces with “the bitter insides.”  These poems speak to liminal places of wilderness and magic, animal and human, the violence threaded through us as we inhabit this world. The experience of reading this collection makes me think of the compression and originality of Emily Dickinson mixed with the imagination and play of Anne Carson. These poems bewitch and bewilder me in the best way."

- Ansel Elkins

THERA WEBB

Thera Webb is an anarchist, archivist, poet, and queerspawn. She has a BA in Gender Studies and Poetry from the New School, an MFA in Poetry from University of North Carolina Greensboro, and an MLIS from Simmons University. Thera is the author of two chapbooks Reality Asylum (h_ngm_n) and On the Shoulders of the Bear (Fractious Press). More poetry can be found in The Volta, Black Sun Lit, Finery, Interrupture, Unsplendid, Hinchas de Poesia, and Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean). The Witch, A Play is her first full length book.