Book Review: Bargain Witch
I should say at the outset that Brooke Palmieri and I are friends, so this review will be somewhat biased. Just as the pandemic hit, we were drawing up plans for a queer anthology collection, but Covid put paid to it. Bargain Witch: Essays in Self-Initiation (Dopamine 2025, 282pp, p/bk) is a collection of autobiographical essays dealing with a wide range of subjects relating to Brooke’s journey into magic and queer relationality
It is indeed a book of queer relations. Relations with people, both living and dead; with animals, fandom, places, events, with books, with times past and present. Brooke tracks effortlessly between all these intersections, opening the reader to the journey he has taken – the multiple collisions, collusions and coincidences in a life of queer witchcraft. Brooke spent some years working at Treadwells Bookshop in London and studying literature, and the joys of books; reading, finding, trading, authorship, and the communities they inspire, resound throughout Bargain Witch.
There are wondrous accounts of rituals – one of my favourites being a London ritual to Christopher Marlowe, where Brooke was joined by playful young foxes. Brooke shares with us the joys of discovering letters – a letter from a sixties’ drag queen; letters from Pamela Coleman Smith. There are the delights of found objects and the “bargains” from which the book’s title is drawn.
There’s a palpable jouissance to Bargain Witch; a queer delight in everything – from chance discoveries and meetings to the simplest of life acts. In this account of a life of witchcraft, Brooke effortlessly embraces both past and present – showing how magical practice can be both ancient and thoroughly modern; ecstatic and quiescent; thrilling and frustrating.
I cannot praise Bargain Witch too highly. It is a marvellous book, deserving a special place on your bookshelf, regardless of whether or not you identify as queer or even a witch.
An interview with Brooke Palmieri.
