Jessica Traynor

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.

‘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)

'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

‘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

‘It’s a beautiful meditation on, among other themes, new parenthood, violence against women, and the destruction of the environment.’ – Liadán Hynes, Sunday Independent

‘But while it may be dark stuff… the language is also wonderful: gothic, Anglo-Saxon, visceral, and well, exhilarating. It’s also attentive to both the tender and the subterranean emotions that arise with the experience of motherhood. More than that, Pit Lullabies harks back to knowledge from ancient times, reminding us of our innate powers as women and as life-givers.’ – Afric McGlinchey, Dublin Review of Books

'Addressing a daughter over a period stretching from foetal scan to birth and beyond, she is broadly concerned with the value as well as the control of darkness. “Try to be the shape that holds the dark,” she advises at the end of 'Pit Lullaby IX'. This exhumation and valuing of the dark may be connected with the breaking of silence and the exposure of institutionalised forms of maternal and child abuse that have been the Irish writer’s preoccupations in some of her previous work. Darkness exhumed, like silence broken, becomes a bright and vital force.' – Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian, on Pit Lullabies

'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, on Pit Lullabies

‘Ireland, where I’m from, is not short of great writers… In poetry, there were standout works from Jessica Traynor in Pit Lullabies and Victoria Kennefick’s Eat or We Both Starve.’ – Sinéad Gleeson, The Guardian (Books enjoyed in June 2022)

'I’ve been moved by Jessica Traynor’s mothering poems in Pit Lullabies – intricate, thought-provoking and delightful.' – Nuala O’Connor, The Irish Times (Best books of 2022 so far)

‘Some of our best-known poets, such as Jessica Traynor and Annemarie Ní Churreáin, also released new collections. Traynor’s Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe) and Ní Churreáin’s The Poison Glen (Gallery) were both concerned with incantation, hexing, history and womanhood, though each is a distinct and urgent voice in their own right.’ – Martina Evans & Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times (The best new poetry of 2022)

‘This year saw so much stellar Irish writing: Polluted Sex, short stories by Lauren Foley, Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples, Edel Coffey’s thriller Breaking Point (all novels), Jessica Traynor’s poetry collection Pit Lullabies…’ – Sinéad Gleeson, The Irish Times (Books of the Year 2022, Writers’ Favourites)

‘What a brilliant year for poetry! I am very much enjoying Jessica Traynor’s third collection, Pit Lullabies which is witty, wicked and moving in equal measure.’ – Victoria Kennefick, RTE Culture (cultural picks)

'I’ve long admired Jess Traynor’s poetry, which is as confident being serious and historical, as it is when it’s arch and playful. There’s a tenderness to how Traynor writes about motherhood, the body, the places we find ourselves. Her new collection Pit Lullabies proves that she’s one of our finest poets, moving through myths, love, and the environment. It’s a visceral work that I know I’ll go back to again and again.' – Sinéad Gleeson, Dubray Books blog:  Irish Writers Recommend Books by Irish Women

'Traynor’s style is forthright, yet also allusive, at times employing shock tactics as an opportunity for philosophical musings, encouraging the reader to experience these poems multiple times.' – Lind Grant-Oyeye, Poetry Ireland Review

‘Here an acerbic wit is fused with ruminations on the female body along with the concerns of early parenthood… Traynor’s sound is effortlessly hypnotic, her language formed, deliberate and lyrical.’ – Anthony Anaxagorou, Poetry Book Society selector

‘While environmental crisis mounts in the background and modern life pulses forward, Pit Lullabies traces the arc from birth to infancy and toddlerdom as a much-wanted child ages on a planet that teeters toward catastrophe. Confronting the difficult realities of birth and its aftermath, the tension between the newly born and Earth’s dead end builds slowly as Pit Lullabies tries to reconcile the gift of mothering with the fact of having “brought you / to this world of always evening, always leaving,” (“The Signs”).’ – Shara Lessley, West Branch

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Jessica Traynor read her poem 'and the girl inside me' from New Arcana for Books Ireland to mark publication. The text of the poem accompanied the film. See the feature here.

Jessica Traynor reads from New Arcana

Jessica Traynor reads and introduces four poems from New Arcana: ‘Lydia’, ‘Bog Virgin’, ‘i'm lydia deetz and all my friends are dead’, ‘Movie night with Lydia: 1: Becoming Catwoman’. Neil Astley filmed her reading from her collection at her home in Dublin in April 2024.

Jessica Traynor reads from Pit Lullabies

Jessica Traynor reads and introduces seven poems from Pit Lullabies: ‘Anatomy Scan’, ‘In the Birthing Room’, ‘If You Can Tame a Wildcat You Can Raise a Baby’, ‘Pit Lullaby, V’, ‘Pit Lullaby, VII’ and ‘Lullaby’. Neil Astley filmed her reading from her collection at her home in Dublin in April 2024.

Jessica Traynor reads from Pit Lullabies at the Bloodaxe online launch

Jessica Traynor read poems from Pit Lullabies at this Bloodaxe online launch event shared with Moniza Alvi and Amali Gunasekera whose three collections were all published in March 2022. At the end of the readings Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley hosted a discussion between the three poets about their new books.

Jessica Traynor reads 'Onion Poem' from Pit Lullabies

Jessica Traynor reads 'Onion Poem' from Pit Lullabies in this film directed by Matthew Thompson for the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation's Read By series produced in collaboration with Irish Arts Center, NYC.

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