Overview

With a cover by renowned comic book artist Lisa Sterle, the poems inJessica 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Jessica Traynor
Publisher:   Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Imprint:   Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Edition:   Paperback original
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 0.90cm , Length: 23.40cm
ISBN:  

9781780377490

ISBN 10:   1780377495
Pages:   96
Publication Date:   25 September 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of 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

Reviews

It is that strong sense of uncanniness throughout Jessica Traynor’s Pit Lullabies that marks it with distinction. The eponymous Pit Lullabies – there are 10 in total – form a wild, exhilarating backbone to this collection where bone is a key word. A book about motherhood and birth trauma… its roots are firmly entrenched in the natural world… Traynor’s poems, like those of Walter de la Mare, are most deadly when they are pared back, almost child-like. -- Martina Evans * The Irish Times * Fierce and profound, Pit Lullabies is one of the vital books of the new Irish poetry. -- Ciarán O’Rourke * New Hibernia Review * Traynor's poems lurk in liminal spaces between light and dark, joy and fear, real and imagined, so that the world is unsettled and unsettling. -- Jenna Clake * Poetry London *

Author Information

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.

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