Fortune’s Lover: A Book of Tarot Poems by Rachel Pollack

Sometimes she imagines she’s somewhere else,on a camel, traveling by pricks of light–or regurgitating webs from a swollen belly–or hanging from a hookin her sister’s meat locker,on the other side of seven doors. From “High Priestess”   The Early Renaissance game of Tarot inspired poetry centuries before it was used for fortune telling. The poems in Fortune’s Lover do not explain the Tarot so much as spin off from it. From accounts of a master class on the Fool that led to the author inadvertently putting into practice the grace they’d just learned about to an insane Merlin predicting three forms of death for the same boy, from a princess who learns never to look to any man to protect or fight for her to a High Priestess locked in her temple of silence, these poems are infused with a wisdom based not so much in finding the right answers as in asking the right questions. Rachel Pollack is the author of thirty books of fiction and non-fiction, which have been published in fourteen lan