[sp]RED - Paperback

by Jessica Doe (Author)

Jessica Doe's [sp]RED slices open the 78-card Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, challenging its canon. These poems trace the deck's Eurocentric inheritance through echoes of Shakespeare, various organized religions, contemporary media, and more, restoring Indigenous presence with themes of motherhood, inherited trauma, hunger, and desire woven throughout. Shakespeare's dying lovers are cut into stars in the Moon's light. A daughter clips mansions from real estate catalogs, ashamed of her father's braid and Goodwill jeans worn in public. A mother watches strangers mock her fair-skinned son, claiming he doesn't look "Indian" enough. In an unflinching feminist reclamation, Doe rewrites each card's colonial symbolism with Cherokee history, cosmology, and worldview. [sp]RED is blistering, visceral, and written for anyone who would turn a family wound into an incantation.