Happy Beltane/May Day! This month, I’d like to highlight the press that Arcana: the Tarot Poetry Anthology is getting. I appreciate all the reviewers, interviewers, and award voters who have given our little book so much love!
Reviews
Arcana was reviewed by Emily E. Auger for Mythprint: Quarterly Bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society. The last line of her review: “This is definitely a collection that students of mythopoeic literature should take note of: if the visual status of Tarot has caused them to pass it by, they are very fortunate that the Arcana poets were not hindered by the same limits of imagination.” You can read the whole review on Emily’s blog.
Joanna C. Valente reviewed Arcana for Luna Luna Magazine. She writes: “All of the poems are full of surprises and stark truths–they wake you up and startle you into seeing yourself properly, as if for the first time, just as a reading is meant to do. In many ways, these poems are not just poems, they are each a realization, they are a reading.”
Arcana: the Tarot Poetry Anthology was also reviewed on Queen Mob’s Teahouse by Greg Bem, who says, “I found the biographies alone, as diverse as the work within, to satisfy my journey through this conceptual anthology…I am glad the effort was put into collecting what are, at the heart, poems of passion and respect for not only the practice of tarot, but the world that surrounds it.”
Sherryl E. Smith reviewed Arcana for her Tarot Heritage blog. Her conclusion: “These poems immerse us in a phosphorescent ocean of swirling images where we float in a dream or thrash in a rip tide until we emerge transformed. I’ll take up this book often to plunge repeatedly into this great sea of images.”
And Arcana was reviewed on Spiral Nature by Nicole Rain Sellers. She says the book “is hard proof of the mysterious power of the tarot to trigger each of us differently, to float us away on unique magic carpet adventures, some lovely, some grotesque, while still anchored to each other by our mutual understanding of a collective tarot catalogue…Like a box of exotic chocolates, Arcana is a book to linger over and enjoy slowly, from cover to cover. My only complaint is that it ended too soon. If you appreciate both poetry and tarot, you must read it.”
Interviews
Also on Spiral Nature, I was interviewed by Psyche. I mentioned how I “highlighted a few folks in the Featured Poets Series…from different countries because I’m fascinated by how tarot looks in a country I’ve never been to before, and what it’s like to be a practitioner of tarot, and a poet in the scene that’s not in America.”
Prior to the book’s release, I was interviewed by December on Seer & Sundry. I briefly described how I got into Tarot: “My mom reads Tarot and gifted me my first deck—the Aquarian Tarot—when I was about fourteen. My paternal grandmother read intuitively with playing cards, so I guess you could say my love of reading cards runs on both sides of the family!”
Award
Arcana: the Tarot Poetry Anthology won the 2015 Tarosophy Award for best indie-published/self-published book! These awards are given out annually by professional Tarot readers from around the world.
If you are inspired to purchase Arcana: the Tarot Poetry Anthology, you can find it on the publisher’s website, Elliott Bay Book Company, Amazon, and other stores. Bay Area folks can pick up a copy at my upcoming Tarot Writing Workshop!
Tarot Poetry 