Who is the Magician? In the fluid zone between the dreamworld and now, between what had been anticipated and what occurred, often rolling under waves of images from the darker side of consciousness, caught in the riptide of death and loss, she enters into dialogue with those she loves. The Magician loves the Earth, cherishes our time here, our complex interdependency and fragility. What is her magic? She has many voices; she isn't human; her forms are multiple and in constant evolution. Other cosmologies inform the present; climate change is only one disturbing factor that alters the course of lives. The existence of stones, snow, and trees becomes the memory that haunts when someone dies, when someone dissolves into unknown spaces. Everything is seen through the prism of dialogue and possibility. There is no mythological quest, no Golden Bough that permits passage. The Magician is a time-machine, a presence beyond the immediate.

* * *

In The Magician’s Tales, Andrea Moorhead tells her readers that “There is no science to imaginary acts.” Dream sequences blur the lines seamlessly between mystic places of the heart and the natural world. Her keen, hyper-sensitive observations of the ocean, the rain, and trees "that walk with you into the unknown even if that reality holds anguish" draw the reader into a complex psychological reality. Magical perceptions evoke a climactic essence as felt in the description of a shroud, “Woven from thistle down and snakeskins, dandelion fleece and milkweed. It lets in light, keeps out the rain; it’s buoyant and soft as skin.” The magical realism of these poems is balanced with acute awareness of the fragility of our existence.

—Silvia Scheibli, author of In the House of Rain

Stepping into Andrea Moorhead’s The Magician’s Tales, you need to adjust your stride to match her careful progress from one momentous event to the next. You must not go too fast or you’ll lose her and you yourself will become lost in a world which only she can open up for you. Paying close attention to her words helps acknowledge within you what never seemed so obvious before. With her in your steady footsteps, in your more than passing glances, in your dreams without memories, in your hands where you touch either “the slow aching of stone miles under the glistening crust,” “the razor-thin marks of eternal fire,” or a simple “white rain,” there’s no destination but where you are now.

—Paul B. Roth, The Bitter Oleander Press

Andrea Moorhead’s poems rely on heightened senses and “sudden shifts in attention”, endlessly conjuring up “the aching of skin in the black grained textures of past encounters.” She not only observes, listens and engages, she reinvents and questions the world around her, allowing language to flutter and sound out, despite being aware of “the stillness surrounding speech.” There is word magic here, word music used to capture and evoke, in opposition to a need to “accept what can only continue to slip away.” Moorhead writes that “one never knows what will pass by, what will emerge or recede”, yet she is consistently able to document and share each surprise encounter, frozen moment, new realization or sudden conviction, her mesmeric poems always “moving into the clear quiet space just below the heart.”

—Rupert Loydell, Editor of Stride

The Magician's Tales
by Andrea Moorhead
$19.95, paperback, 88 pp
ISBN-13:  978-1-952335-86-0

• Tweet