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The Truth Is Told Better This Way
Following hot on the heels of Relit Award-nominated No Work Finished Here (BookThug, 2016), the poems collected in The Truth is Told Better This Way may be some of Liz Worth's most personal and confessional works yet.
Pulling from raw themes of grief and death, regret and discomfort, sadness and failure, Worth wears these poems down to their bones. Straddling dreamy, ethereal images and brutal honesty, The Truth is Told Better This Way unravels its secrets one line at a time. The result is oracular and surreal, as each piece could be read as a magic spell that mesmerizes as much as a poem that tantalizes the senses.
Praise for The Truth is Better Told This Way
Told with a wink and a sly smile, Worth's deliciously dark and defiant poetry crawls under one's skin and stays there. The characters in The Truth is Told Better This Way dance barefoot on dirty club floors, pee with the door open and whisper their hard-won truth into subway payphones. Like an unforgotten lover whom you just can't shake, the poems in this collection will keep you up at night. —Heather Babcock, author of Of Being Underground and Moving Backwards
Pulling from raw themes of grief and death, regret and discomfort, sadness and failure, Worth wears these poems down to their bones. Straddling dreamy, ethereal images and brutal honesty, The Truth is Told Better This Way unravels its secrets one line at a time. The result is oracular and surreal, as each piece could be read as a magic spell that mesmerizes as much as a poem that tantalizes the senses.
Praise for The Truth is Better Told This Way
Told with a wink and a sly smile, Worth's deliciously dark and defiant poetry crawls under one's skin and stays there. The characters in The Truth is Told Better This Way dance barefoot on dirty club floors, pee with the door open and whisper their hard-won truth into subway payphones. Like an unforgotten lover whom you just can't shake, the poems in this collection will keep you up at night. —Heather Babcock, author of Of Being Underground and Moving Backwards
- GenresPoetry
76 pages, ebook
First published October 16, 2017
14 people want to read
About the author
Liz Worth
12 books65 followersMy latest title, Going Beyond the Little White Book: A Contemporary Guide to Tarot, is now here.
This is my fifth book, and the first I've written on the subject of tarot.
In 2017, my latest poetry collection, The Truth is Told Better This Way, will be published by BookThug.
I thought her one and only career would be as a writer, but I started reading tarot in 2008 on the advice of an astrologer and my life has never been the same.
Today I tarot help others move past emotional and creative blocks, overcome any obstacles or setbacks, and begin to live their truth through personal freedom and creative liberation.
I'm based in Toronto, but read and teach clients all over the world thanks to the wonders of Skype.
Locally, I read tarot at Likely General and SeeSaw Cafe, as well as at a number of events throughout the city.
I also write an astrology column for Spiral Nature (www.spiralnature.com).
If you'd like to book a private reading with me, or sign up for a workshop, please visit my website.
Interested in more of my writing? Feel free to check out my current books: PostApoc (fiction), Amphetamine Heart (poetry), and Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond (non-fiction).
I find poetry in empty parking lots, inspiration on long bus rides, and clarity in the woods.
Lifelong obsessions include The Smiths, ghosts, black leather boots, John Hughes movies, The Outsiders, Poppy Z. Brite, The Cure, experimental writing, early mornings, thrift stores, and bike rides.
This is my fifth book, and the first I've written on the subject of tarot.
In 2017, my latest poetry collection, The Truth is Told Better This Way, will be published by BookThug.
I thought her one and only career would be as a writer, but I started reading tarot in 2008 on the advice of an astrologer and my life has never been the same.
Today I tarot help others move past emotional and creative blocks, overcome any obstacles or setbacks, and begin to live their truth through personal freedom and creative liberation.
I'm based in Toronto, but read and teach clients all over the world thanks to the wonders of Skype.
Locally, I read tarot at Likely General and SeeSaw Cafe, as well as at a number of events throughout the city.
I also write an astrology column for Spiral Nature (www.spiralnature.com).
If you'd like to book a private reading with me, or sign up for a workshop, please visit my website.
Interested in more of my writing? Feel free to check out my current books: PostApoc (fiction), Amphetamine Heart (poetry), and Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond (non-fiction).
I find poetry in empty parking lots, inspiration on long bus rides, and clarity in the woods.
Lifelong obsessions include The Smiths, ghosts, black leather boots, John Hughes movies, The Outsiders, Poppy Z. Brite, The Cure, experimental writing, early mornings, thrift stores, and bike rides.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 3, 2018
I think anyone who loves poetry would love this book. Pick up a copy today and enjoy the words of Worth. A true artist of our time.
August 17, 2022
Honest, gritty, yet with an underlying hope.
March 3, 2018
Damn, The Truth is Told Better This Way is a gritty, dark collection of a wild, sometimes out of control life. It does not shy away from exploring poverty, isolation, mental illness, and heart break, and the words are sharp, tearing into your flesh and sitting there uncomfortably.
November 27, 2017
Told with a wink and a sly smile, Worth’s deliciously dark and defiant poetry crawls under one’s skin and stays there. Like an unforgotten lover whom you just can’t shake, the poems in this collection will keep you up at night.
November 22, 2017
Ms. Worth goes against the longstanding pile of bullshit that women’s art cannot portray the grotesque or the unspoken. In this collection of poems, Worth writes of unvarnished urban realities experienced by a young woman who struggles with poverty, drugs, self-esteem, isolation. Her imagery is visceral and unique.
“I’m the kind of girl who lets strange men’s legs rest/against hers/on crowded subways.//(Lift. Just a little more.)” Worth writes in the opening poem, “Suburban wilds: a self-portrait.” This unashamed attitude towards women’s sexuality continues throughout the book. This kind of ferocity and unflinching look at contemporary life is something I particularly admire in Canada’s women writers, such as Worth, Heather O’Neill, Lynn Crosbie, Christine McNair, Sandra Ridley, Julie Mannell, Gwen Benaway, Vivek Shraya, the list goes on.
At the same time Worth depicts the vulnerability of young women in poems like “Aspirations,” the title of the book’s first section, “Judy tried to kiss me in my/twenty-dollar leather pants and army jacket./I was too blemished,/hypersensitive.”
The ferocity is a thread throughout the book in which the speaker believes she “would grow up to be a wolf, (“Spit, sister”) “could become a burnt church/a white animal, a rippled pane of glass: something beyond.” (“Forest Tides”).
There’s the feeling of wanting to escape from oneself, to be not oneself but something other.
There’s something MacEwenesque in the writing too, a quest for the spiritual, for pathways into another world, in the way that Gwendolyn MacEwen loved the Egyptian and quested for answers to her dreams through Jungian archetypes. Here Worth writes of tarot, astrology, prayer, dreams, witches and mystics, pagan and Catholic rituals.
There’s nothing I don’t love about this book, but I’m writing here specifically about the ferocity and the rawness of the images, which speak to me on a personal level, which make me call this writer a kindred.
“I’m the kind of girl who lets strange men’s legs rest/against hers/on crowded subways.//(Lift. Just a little more.)” Worth writes in the opening poem, “Suburban wilds: a self-portrait.” This unashamed attitude towards women’s sexuality continues throughout the book. This kind of ferocity and unflinching look at contemporary life is something I particularly admire in Canada’s women writers, such as Worth, Heather O’Neill, Lynn Crosbie, Christine McNair, Sandra Ridley, Julie Mannell, Gwen Benaway, Vivek Shraya, the list goes on.
At the same time Worth depicts the vulnerability of young women in poems like “Aspirations,” the title of the book’s first section, “Judy tried to kiss me in my/twenty-dollar leather pants and army jacket./I was too blemished,/hypersensitive.”
The ferocity is a thread throughout the book in which the speaker believes she “would grow up to be a wolf, (“Spit, sister”) “could become a burnt church/a white animal, a rippled pane of glass: something beyond.” (“Forest Tides”).
There’s the feeling of wanting to escape from oneself, to be not oneself but something other.
There’s something MacEwenesque in the writing too, a quest for the spiritual, for pathways into another world, in the way that Gwendolyn MacEwen loved the Egyptian and quested for answers to her dreams through Jungian archetypes. Here Worth writes of tarot, astrology, prayer, dreams, witches and mystics, pagan and Catholic rituals.
There’s nothing I don’t love about this book, but I’m writing here specifically about the ferocity and the rawness of the images, which speak to me on a personal level, which make me call this writer a kindred.
January 2, 2018
dark, feminine. witchy.
June 25, 2020
The opening section, Aspirations, gave me hope, but the rest of the collection didn't hold up to it. It's not a bad collection, but wasn't for me.
Neat cover, though.
Neat cover, though.
April 8, 2022
Amazing expressions and imagery used! I'm trying to read more poetry and this was a great book to start with - complex yet easy to understand!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews