call the necromancer
By Leia Penina Wilson

ISBN: 978-0-900575-28-0 | 172 pages | Price: $20 | Release Date: 4/1/2026

“it seeped into my blood too
			        that shade of green   killer!”

Incantation or hex? Curative or curse? Buzzing, clomping, and crying out solilo-quies, Leia Penina Wilson’s call the necromancer performs boldly on the page. Be medusa’d, be transmogrified: follow cordeliababy (King Lear) down a terrificus rabbit hole where the poet, acting as voice mediator and corpse manipulator, prompts readers to weigh the value of death against the absurdity of reason. A vibrant carnival of language, call the necromancer shatters expectations for femme sexuality, embracing the vulgar, the violent, the desirous, and the pleasurable.

Praise for call the necromancer

From an urgent underworld of exclamatory rage, Leia Penina Wilson tells us it’s “all imagination & horror baby.” What is necromancy if not a refusal of order? Wilson’s ecstatic narrator is narrative’s transcendent rejector, reminding us that “death is the real prerequisite for being a likable gurl” but also singularly, blazingly not giving a fuck about the prescription of likability because “fuck! if! the! future! isn’t! so! jekyll!” This book is mythic, epic, furious, and sprawling, a scream from the bardo, Lear’s daughters gone off the rails.

– Niina Pollari, author of Path of Totality



Simultaneously exulting in and condemning poetry’s identification with cosplay and capital, Leia Penina Wilson’s call the necromancer is written at a blistering pitch in the key of Cassandra (if soul-deadening tech glitches had been her primary portal to the oracular). Haunted by what intimacy looks like in an age of internalized surveillance, these poems excavate and throttle the idea that performative solitude is any kind of substitute for lived affinity and kinship. Maudlin, vicious, incandescent–Penina Wilson thrashes wildly to break free from the murderous thicket of gender and from the white imagination as a limit experience for the racialized subject.

– Lara Glenum, author of Snow

About the Author

Leia Penina Wilson is proudly Samoan and the author of three books: This Red Metropolis What Remains (Omnidawn Press), Splinters Are Children of Wood (University of Notre Dame Press), and i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) (Red Hen Press). When not reading trashy monster romance novels, she plays Magic: The Gathering. Her favorite commander is Olivia Voldaren. Her favorite ninja turtle is Donatello. Other favorites include Sailor Moon, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dragon Age, cinnamon tea, rice pudding, and crafts.