Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea

Longlisted for the 2025 Hamilton Literary Awards, Poetry Category

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.

LIZ WORTH is a poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer. She is a two-time nominee for the ReLit Award for Poetry for her books The Truth Is Told Better This Way and No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol. Her first book, Treat Me Like Dirt, was the first of its kind to provide an in-depth history of Southern Ontario’s first wave punk movement. Her other works also include Amphetamine Heart, PostApoc, and The Mouth is a Coven. Her writing has appeared in Chatelaine, FLARE, Prism, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and Broken Pencil, among others. Liz is a professional tarot reader and lives in Hamilton, Ontario.