How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager)

By Jennifer A. McGowan

The tarot has been used to play games since the 15th century. Since that time each card has also accumulated meanings. By the 18th century the tarot was used for divination or for oracular purposes, much like the Delphic oracles of old. Nowadays the trumps, or major arcana, are believed to chronicle, symbolically, the journey of the Fool through life.
How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager) explores, exploits, and sometimes downright twists the major arcana and the meanings they have accumulated, in the order in which the many hundreds of tarot decks now travelling the world present them. The Star, connoting hope, exists simultaneously as metaphor and feral dog; the rebirth nestled inside the Death card becomes female friendship and escape from patriarchal binds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arachne Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781913665654

Jennifer A. McGowan

Jennifer A. McGowan lives in Oxford. Despite being certified as disabled with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome at age 16, she became a semi-professional mime artist and performed until the disability became too much. Recently she has worked as researcher, editor, and writer for a UK company in 'devil’s advocacy'. She has taught both under- and postgraduates at several universities, across English, history, and heritage studies. Jennifer’s first full collection 'With Paper for Feet' was published by in 2017, and her poem, 'Lady Hale', was published in Arachne anthology 'No Spider Harmed in the Making of this Book'. Jennifer’s poems have also appeared in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Connecticut Review, Gargoyle, Storm Cellar, Envoi, Acumen, and Agenda; her chapbooks, 'Life in Captivity' and 'Sounding' are available from Finishing Line Press. Her work has been anthologized in 'Birchsong' (Blue Line Press, 2012), 'A Moment of Change' (Aqueduct Press, 2012), and Arachne Press’ 'The Other Side of Sleep'. Her songs have been recorded on several labels.

Book preview

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First published in UK 2022 by Arachne Press Limited

100 Grierson Road, London, SE23 1NX

www.arachnepress.com

© Jennifer A. McGowan 2022

ISBNs

Print: 978-1-913665-64-7

eBook: 978-1-913665-65-4

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Except for short passages for review purposes no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of Arachne Press.

Thanks to Muireann Grealy for her proofreading.

Cover design: Tom Charlesworth 2022.

To the best of aunts, Beth Phillips.

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Acknowledgements

Poems in this collection have been published, sometimes in slightly different versions, in Obsessed with Pipework, The International Times, Acumen, Poetry Wivenhoe, Enchanted Conversation, Wombwell Rainbow, Ink Sweat & Tears, Three Drops from a Cauldron, The Brown Envelope Book, Littoral Magazine Abergavenny Small Press.

Poems from the Year 2020 (ed. M. Williams, Shoestring, 2021) Life in Captivity (Finishing Line Press, 2011)

One Breath came third in the Gloucestershire Poetry Society’s 2020 competition.

Contents

Foreword

Prologue: The Real World

Fool on the Mountain

Butterfly Effect

How to be a Tarot Card, or a Teenager

Bateleur Eagle

The Magi

Says the Magus

Difference

Hymn

The Empress

To My Mother, 100 Years from Now

Putting on 15th Century Clothing Blindfolded

Dr Wick

Shrapnel

The Green Man

Circe

Sign

Given

Tristan and Yseult

A Little Space

Curved

The Civilised Princeling

Deaths of the Salem Witches

The Nun Who Knew

Self Portrait as Empty Coke Can

Life in Captivity

There May Have Been Lions

My Own World

Gifted

One, Please

Lamplighter

Wager

Replacing the Fuse Boxes

Icarus after Lockdown

The Stag

Waterbed

Riding Out in October

Who Goes There?

Gringolet

High Achiever

The Miracle of Wings

Why Snakes are Always Female

Skinwalker

Don’t Look

The Girl in the Raven Mask

Meditationary

Hagged

One Breath

Devilskin

Horse-face and Ox-head

Kali Ma

Broken Tower

Bad Hours

The Cave and the