[sp]RED, Jessica Doe

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 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.

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Poetry has always been mysterious to me. Words woven together like tiny magical incantations—how does one create these spells? I suppose the same could be said about Tarot. 78 images, each one telling a story. And oh, what stories they tell! The human journey, daily life, and omens of futures yet to be written! In sp[RED], poetry and Tarot intersect, inviting the reader to venture forth with curiosity. How can I look at the Hanged Man the same way after reading Jessica Doe’s poems? This book is the one to turn to when you wish to see the cards through new eyes or when your connection to magic and beauty has been broken by this hard, terrible world. A gorgeous tribute to my beloved Tarot.

–Theresa Reed, author of The Cards You’re Dealt – How To Deal When Life Gets Real: A Tarot Guidebook

Jessica Doe’s [sp]RED is a searing, spellbinding collection—at once incantation, resistance, and revolution. Rooted in Indigenous survival and feminist ferocity, these poems reimagine the Tarot arcana through a lens of ancestral truth, political defiance, and bodily sovereignty. Doe’s language is lush and unflinching, mythic and precise. Every page feels like prophecy etched in bone, a map for navigating rupture and reclamation. This is not a book—it’s a ceremony. A reckoning. A rebirth.

–Jenny Forrester, author of Soft Hearted Stories: Seeking Saviors, Cowboy Stylists, and Other Fallacies of Authoritarianism

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Jessica Doe, PhD is an Aniyunwiya inter/multi/anti-disciplinary writer, artist, and scholar. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, but born on the northwest region of Turtle Island (fka Oregon in the United States), space, place, Indigenization, and decolonization are driving forces in her work, which has been described as avant-garde conceptualism and includes several books and exhibitions. Jessica’s doctoral research focused on the intersection of female poetry and eating disorders with an emphasis on Sylvia Plath. Her monograph expands this research to encompass modern/contemporary Indigenous and Indigiqueer poetry. As a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Bengaluru, India, she implemented the first credit-based generative poetry workshop for doctoral candidates at her host university site. During her time as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, she completed an erasure poetry project using university archives as primary documents. Currently, Jessica is working on an Indigenous short horror collection. Jessica lives on NDN land with her family, which includes an ever-growing menagerie of spoilt ᏪᏌ.