Full Description
Jessica Traynor's New Arcana explores grief, bad boyfriends and the power of female friendship through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies. Moving from teenage friendship and destructive relationships towards a tangling with the realities of family life, domesticity, and desire, this highly inventive collection builds into a heartbroken letter to a dear friend (personified in the poems as 'lydia deetz') who died by suicide. Interwoven with numbered poems from a newly imagined Major Arcana, New Arcana celebrates both the holding on, and the letting go.
New Arcana is Jessica Traynor's fourth collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Dedalus and Pit Lullabies (2022) from Bloodaxe.
Contents
I
10 The Hive, xxiii
11 Lydia...
12 Bog Virgin
14 monstera
15 and the girl inside me
16 Satanic Panic
17 Roger Moore's Swimming Pool
18 i'm lydia deetz and all my friends are dead
19 Lydia Reads the Cards
20 He Gets Her the Cloths of Heaven
21 The Liar, xxiv
22 Becoming Schrödinger's Cat
23 Ezekiel 47:11
24 Queen of Cups
28 The Conductor, xxv
29 Movie Night with Lydia
34 Lydia Reads the Cards
35 dear (name)
38 Your unifying theory of everything
39 The Mistress, xxvi
40 The Tower
41 The Marishes
42 I'm Quartered
44 Sheila on the Red Bed
45 Magpie
46 The Scientist, xxvii
II
48 The Glacier, xxviii
49 The Fool
50 The drunk psychotherapist dooms you at the party
51 Movie Night with Lydia
56 I've Been Meaning to Say, Lydia
62 Lydia Reads the Cards
63 Entre des bois et des plages sauvages
64 Tiger
65 Putting My Arms Around the Goat
66 In the Night Garden
67 A kid tells my daughter her storybook is broken
68 Allegory
69 Villanelle Villanelle
70 The Keeners
71 I Read the Cards
72 The Thief, xxix
73 what the women are doing
74 Junk File of Incorrect Predictions
75 The Algorithm, xxx
76 Rabbits
77 The Good Girls, xxxi
78 The Steak
79 The nights I don't think about you
80 Parachute Malfunction
81 Always Eating Your Dad
82 King of Wands (Reversed)
83 The New Moon, xxxii
84 Well-behaved
85 A reading for the dead
86 to you, one year on
87 Ten of Swords
88 lydia...
89 On Halloween
93 Acknowledgements
94 Thanks
95 Notes
