New Arcana

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.

Jessica Traynor was born in Dublin in 1984 and is a poet, essayist and librettist. Her debut collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award and in 2016 was named one of the best poetry debuts of the past five years on Bustle.com. Her second collection, The Quick, was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2022. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was an Irish Times poetry books of the year choice for 2022. Pit Lullabies was shortlisted for the inaugural Yeats Society Sligo’s Poetry Prize in 2023 and Jessica Traynor received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry 2023. She is poetry editor at Banshee.