like a Renaissance etchingwhere the body is dividedinto little antechamberswith servants scuttling around –their quaint hats!Their whispered conversations!They’re bringing drinks on salversAnd plucking game, ignoringmy leaking ventricles.Between my breast sits a throneand in it, a bored angelwith a serpent and mace.In the lower realms,they’ve planted the acresof my intestinesand set a crowd of serfsto rotate the crops. The whole shebangis a working demonstrationof women’s mysterious innards,where the servants argueand spill the choler into the bile,beat dust from my bed-curtain lungs.Above and outside all of this,my head alone escapes cross-section.Does this pointto a tragic emptiness?I have no faith in this kingdom,except that I know the sunmust rise and set,and sometimes I feel the rain.
I’m Quartered
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“I’m Quartered” from NEW ARCANA: by Jessica Traynor.
Published by Bloodaxe Books on September 25, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Jessica Traynor.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
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 (Dedalus Press, 2019), was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. A Place of Pointed Stones, a pamphlet commissioned by Offaly County Council, was published by The Salvage Press in 2021. The poems were later featured in a radio programme written and presented by Jessica Traynor, The Lyric Feature: A Place of Pointed Stones, first broadcast on Lyric FM in October 2023. 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. Her fourth, New Arcana, was published by Bloodaxe in 2025. It was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2026 in association with Listowel Writers’ Week.
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.
"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)
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