Odd Arcana: tarology for beginners

Odd Arcana: tarology for beginners

by Toti O’Brien

Odd Arcana is odd, as the title discloses. It plays with the idea of the Tarot major arcana. It respects their numbers (22) but can’t remember their names or their symbols, so it makes them up. It starts with the images. Poems follow—from within the images. There’s no plan, but there is a flow. The prose poems in italics mimic divination, but they are eminently ignorant of the art, so they don’t know what they are saying. They pretend but from the bottom of their heart. The reader is free to bluntly ignore them. They don’t mind.

Toti O’Brien writes that this book is “an intimate illustrated reverie, with some hidden flesh and blood roots, or tendrils.”

You like looking at the moon in the face
sustaining the ambiguity of her gaze.
You think you understand her.
After all, you can be elusive as well.
Are the two of you related? Once
you must have been.

-Toti O’Brien

ABOUT THE BOOK
Odd Arcana: tarology for beginners
by Toti O’Brien
50 pages; 8.5″x8.5″
ISBN 979-8388526977
$12
Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, California, United States, 2023

You can purchase the book from Amazon or email the artist.