Magical Poetics: The Power of Language and Effective Poetry 
by Robert Eric Shoemaker

Publication Date: November 12, 2026
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Link to purchase: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/magical-poetics-9781350567368/#

“This book is a brilliant reminder of the origins of poetry, almost to the point of saying that magical poetics is redundant, because for too long we forgot that magic and poetry are the same. Robert Eric Shoemaker restores our understanding of occult connections of song from flesh. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.”
— CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

Magical Poetics: The Power of Language and Effective Poetry by poet, scholar, and educator Robert Eric Shoemaker is an ambitious and groundbreaking study that reimagines poetry as a form of transformative action by drawing on its roots in ritual and magical language.

Drawing on literary criticism, cultural theory, queer and feminist thought, and linguistics, Magical Poetics argues that language does more than represent reality; it actively shapes it.

Tracing connections between ancient ritual practices and contemporary poetry, Shoemaker demonstrates how poets throughout history have used language to describe the world and to alter our perception of it, to challenge systems of power, and to expand consciousness while imagining new possibilities for collective life.

Part literary history, part critical theory, and part practical guide, Magical Poetics examines the work of writers including modern pillars such as W.B. Yeats, H.D., Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Spicer alongside contemporary poets such as CAConrad, Nathaniel Mackey, Ariana Reines, Anne Waldman, and Selah Saterstrom. Through close readings and interdisciplinary analysis, Shoemaker explores how metaphor, symbolism, allusion, ritual, performance, and serial forms function as technologies of transformation.

Key Themes

• Poetry as a transformative and world-making practice
• The relationship between language, imagination, and power
• Magic, ritual, and literary history
• Queer, feminist, and decolonial approaches to language and poetics
• The ethical responsibilities of artistic language
• Contemporary experimental poetry and social change
• Creative practices for writers and educators

Advance Praise

“Magic is a creative force, an inspiration for the imagination. In this absorbing book, Shoemaker explores the potency of language and the enchantment of our lives through poetry. Drawing upon esoteric histories and literary tradition, Magical Poetics provides a fascinating account of the transformative power of cultured expression.”
— Owen Davies, author of Grimoires: A History of Magic Books

About the Author

Robert Eric Shoemaker is a poet, scholar, and educator whose work focuses on contemporary poetry and poetics, queer theory, and cultural criticism. He is the author of Ca’Venezia (2021), We Knew No Mortality (2018), and 30 Days Dry (2015). His forthcoming books include The Gothic World of Edgar Allan Poe, The Ecstasy of Saint Sebastian, and his translation of Catherine of Siena’s Prayers. He completed a PhD in humanities from the University of Louisville, an MFA in creative writing and poetics from Naropa University, and a BA in theatre and performance studies from the University of Chicago.

“Magical Poetics is a reassuring manual for the linguistic magician devoted to the art of poetry and the vision of inclusivity in which binaries are dispelled and categories dissolved.”
— K. Prevallet, author of Trance Poetics, from the book’s foreword

Jacket Description

Just like a magician, spiritual guide or modern-day witch, poets use their craft to tap into the inherent power of language as an agent of change, willing words to construct and alter reality through intentional acts and performances.

Through an examination of the linguistic, historical, and affective poetics of magic, this book shows how pragmatic magical practices from the ancient and Medieval worlds, and poetry from the English Romantics to the present day, leverage the same linguistic qualities to bring about change.

Making the case that contemporary poets, especially poets of disenfranchised identity groups, write with language meant to do something, Robert Eric Shoemaker highlights how these writers successfully incant through language, using techniques such as metaphor, symbolism, chant and other magics, to change their readers by leveraging slippages of meaning. Drawing on the long histories of magical, religious, and ritual language, from modernist poets through the English Romantics and stretching back to poems and spells from the Middle Ages and ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Jewish traditions, this book establishes a theoretical, analytic, and practical framework for magical poetics. An introduction to the theory and topic, Magical Poetics manages and expands on important poetic legacies, establishes frameworks of contemporary practitioners and aids today’s writers and readers in seeing the importance of poetry in the everyday, positioning them as part of the larger lineage of poet-hierophants who may work to change the world with words.

“Magical Poetics traces a vital lineage of oracular arts and poetic intervention, moving nimbly across intertwined histories and speculative futures. Here, poetics is approached as a landscape shaped by both canonical trajectories and emergent desire lines that continually reshape it. Attuned to the murmurs of ritual and incantation, Shoemaker reads poetry as both archive and apparatus: a site where language conjures, unsettles, and reorients perception. The result is a radical reimagining of poetic practice as a mode of world-making, refusing the division between aesthetics and magic and instead treating their convergence as a generative force for thinking, feeling, and being.”
— Kristen E. Nelson, author of In the Away Time

Book Information

Title: Magical Poetics: The Power of Language and Effective Poetry
Author: Robert Eric Shoemaker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Series: Research in Creative Writing
Publication Date: November 12, 2026
Format: Hardback, Nov 2026; Paperback, May 2027
Pages: 200
Dimensions: 9 x 6 inches
Genre: Academic Monograph / Literary Criticism
Link: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/magical-poetics-9781350567368/
ISBN: 9781350567368

Table of Contents

Foreword by KPrevallet
Part One: Theory
Chapter 1: Poetry’s Upper Limit: An Introduction to Magical Poetics
Chapter 2: Language for Magic: Semiotic Disruption and the Gap
Chapter 3: A History of Magical Poetics: Practical and Aesthetic Magic
Chapter 4: Border Crossings: Magical Effects from Poem to Body to Group
Chapter 5: Why and How, Now: Queerness and Ethical Efficacy
Part Two: Application
Chapter 6: As Above, So Below: The Practice of Magical Poetics
Chapter 7: Metaphor as Linguistic Alchemy: Magical Thingness
Chapter 8: Symbols and Conjuring Self: H.D. and Other Hermetic Definitions
Chapter 9: Allusion as Theurgy: Bibliomancy for New Canons and Lineages
Chapter 10: Epic and Serial Poetry: Magically Redefining Identity, Nation, and Power
Chapter 11: Poetry-as-Power: Magical Poetics Today

Link to purchase: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/magical-poetics-9781350567368/#

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For interviews, speaking events, or other opportunities and bookings, please contact: Robert Eric Shoemaker, robertericshoemaker@gmail.com, http://www.reshoemaker.com