New Arcana - Jessica Traynor

With a cover by renowned comic book artist Lisa Sterle, the poems in Jessica Traynor’s New Arcana explore 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. 

Among other awards, Jessica Traynor has received Hennessy New Writer of the Year and the Lawrence O''Shaughnessy Award for Poetry 2023. New Arcana is her fourth collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Dedalus and Pit Lullabies (2022) from Bloodaxe.