![Cover image for [sp]red by Jessica Doe](https://www.sundresspublications.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/image001-716x1065.jpg)
Sundress Publications announces the release of Jessica Doe’s [sp]RED, a visceral collection that slices open the 78-card Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck to challenge its Eurocentric canon and restore Indigenous presence to its familiar symbols.
Moving through echoes of Shakespeare, organized religion, contemporary media, and more, Doe reimagines the tarot through Cherokee history, cosmology, and worldview while tracing motherhood, inherited trauma, hunger, and desire. Shakespeare’s dying lovers are cut into stars beneath the Moon’s light. A daughter clips mansions from real estate catalogs, ashamed of her father’s braid and Goodwill jeans. A mother watches strangers scrutinize her fair-skinned son, insisting he does not look “Indian” enough. Across these poems, the personal and ancestral converge as family wounds become sites of memory, resistance, and incantation. Unflinching in its feminist reclamation of a visual tradition shaped by colonial inheritance, [sp]RED asks what becomes possible when inherited symbols are broken apart and remade. Blistering and intimate, the collection transforms the tarot from a received system into a space for Indigenous survival, bodily sovereignty, and reclamation.
Jenny Forrester, author of Soft Hearted Stories: Seeking Saviors, Cowboy Stylists, and Other Fallacies of Authoritarianism, writes, “Jessica Doe’s [sp]RED is a searing, spellbinding collection…Rooted in Indigenous survival and feminist ferocity, these poems reimagine the Tarot arcana through a lens of ancestral truth, political defiance, and bodily sovereignty… This is not a book—it’s a ceremony. A reckoning. A rebirth.”
Jessica Doe, PhD is an Aniyunwiya inter/multi/anti-disciplinary writer, artist, and scholar and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her work explores space, place, Indigenization, decolonization, poetry, and embodiment across scholarship and creative practice. A former Fulbright Senior Scholar, she is currently writing an Indigenous short horror collection grounded in Indigeneity.
