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New Arcana by Jessica Traynor
'Jessica Traynor’s New Arcana continues a body of work that has steadily expanded in ambition and reach. Her writing moves with control between the personal and the symbolic, drawing on image and pattern as a way of thinking through experience. The collection reflects a poet working with confidence, deepening an already distinctive voice.'
– Dr Isabel Galleymore and Zaffar Kunial, Judges of the Pigott Poetry Prize 2026
‘In poetry, Jess Traynor's fourth collection New Arcana is a brilliant, luminous work that blends the mystical and the contemporary, interrogating power, gender, and transformation with precision and lyric grace.’
– Elaine Feeney, Sunday Independent (Best Books of 2025)
‘Themes of memory, love and loss rub shoulders with Tarot in Dublin poet Jessica Traynor’s fourth collection. [...] a strikingly beautiful nod to the lasting echoes of a friendship - and one not without humour at times, too.’
– Lauren Murphy, RTÉ Culture (The best Irish books of 2025)
‘New Arcana is Jessica Traynor’s striking, ambitious elegy for an old school friend who died by suicide and speaks here through the persona of Lydia Deetz from Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. Poems imagining a new Major Arcana are interwoven throughout the sometimes funny, always heartbreaking dialogue between Traynor and Lydia.’
– Martina Evans, The Irish Times
‘But what impresses most about the narrative threading New Arcana is the feeling of something revived or even resurrected by Traynor’s strange koans. The voice speaking back at us through the spirit board at the book’s centre feels so true to life that we can almost feel the planchette quivering beneath our fingertips. Ultimately what New Arcana is astute enough to recognise is that the subject of any resurrection necessarily emerges back into the world changed, a little off-centre, forever marked by their dying and the pain of being brought back.’
– James Patterson, RTÉ Culture (Book of the Week)
'Every reading uncovers new depths and moves me more intensely. The understated emotion as well as the imaginative sweep is both a lesson in ‘less is more’ and a measure of Traynor’s skill in making each word work.'
– Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon, on New Arcana
'Drawing from the names and readings of tarot cards, the poems in New Arcana, Jessica Traynor’s fourth collection, are dreamlike and cryptic, reflecting a mosaic of childhood memories and longings. At its core, the book is a long elegiac sequence mourning the death of a much-missed school friend who died by suicide. [...] The power of teenage friendship is celebrated and amplified through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies.'
– Jennifer Wong, Under the Radar
'A hard-hitting collection, shaded with light and dark, which makes sense of the cruelty of life through the lens of cartomancy and the films of Tim Burton. Inventive and visceral, these poems are songs of grief, pointers of accusation, dissections of trauma and loss. The desperately tender poems in memory of a lost friend, Lydia, are countered by hopeful, gentle poems about the poet’s daughters. A collection which looks at life askance, chronicling what occurs when “angel(s) / look away”.'
– Shash Trevett, Poetry Book Society Autumn Bulletin 2025, on New Arcana
About the Book
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. New Arcana was named as a finalist for Ireland's prestigious Pigott Poetry Prize.
About the Author
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 book of the year. A Place of Pointed Stones, a pamphlet commissioned by Offaly County Council, was published by The Salvage Press in 2021. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies, was published by Bloodaxe in March 2022. It is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was a summer reading recommendation in the Guardian, and an Irish Times Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the Yeats Society Sligo/ Irish Independent Poetry Prize.
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