EKPHRASIS AS DIVINATION: AN INCANTATION CATALOGUE
Ekphrasis as Divination: An Incantation Catalogue is an inward exploration into self by way of mythic card divination reading and language baptism. This collection, composed almost entirely in the form of found language beginning first with Theo Hall’s mythos and fortune telling cards, Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (written in 1911 and was likely the work Eliot referenced when he was writing “The Wasteland”), and The Tarot of the Bohemians: The Most Ancient Book in the World, for the Use of Initiates by Papus (translated by A.P Morton, with the preface written by Waite as well), Keats’ Letters, and a few phrases Lear collected along this journey. In these pages you will find your fortune burned and bleeding into the colorful language landscape we all look to transcend.
Poetry/ 978-1-963115-37-6/February 11, 2025
Ekphrasis as Divination: An Incantation Catalogue is an inward exploration into self by way of mythic card divination reading and language baptism. This collection, composed almost entirely in the form of found language beginning first with Theo Hall’s mythos and fortune telling cards, Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (written in 1911 and was likely the work Eliot referenced when he was writing “The Wasteland”), and The Tarot of the Bohemians: The Most Ancient Book in the World, for the Use of Initiates by Papus (translated by A.P Morton, with the preface written by Waite as well), Keats’ Letters, and a few phrases Lear collected along this journey. In these pages you will find your fortune burned and bleeding into the colorful language landscape we all look to transcend.
Poetry/ 978-1-963115-37-6/February 11, 2025
Ekphrasis as Divination: An Incantation Catalogue is an inward exploration into self by way of mythic card divination reading and language baptism. This collection, composed almost entirely in the form of found language beginning first with Theo Hall’s mythos and fortune telling cards, Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (written in 1911 and was likely the work Eliot referenced when he was writing “The Wasteland”), and The Tarot of the Bohemians: The Most Ancient Book in the World, for the Use of Initiates by Papus (translated by A.P Morton, with the preface written by Waite as well), Keats’ Letters, and a few phrases Lear collected along this journey. In these pages you will find your fortune burned and bleeding into the colorful language landscape we all look to transcend.
Poetry/ 978-1-963115-37-6/February 11, 2025
Praise for EKPHRASIS AS DIVINATION
Ekphrasis as Divination invites the reader into a seductive and collaborative world of found language propelled by the magic of poetic tarot and mythmaking. Robyn Leigh Lear curates a stunning, mystical experience by skillfully threading a striking choir of voices, visual art, and intertextuality. I celebrate the creative risks in Lear’s modernist mode of mimetic storytelling with lush lyricism and vivid imagery. This beautiful and mysterious book drips with the dark joy of duende.
—Tiana Clark, author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood
If poetry is experience searching for purpose through language, then Robin Leigh Lear’s Ekphrasis as Divination: An Incantation Catalogue is a sacred geometric hue of poetic experience—illuminations encasing spells in the case of poetry, served via the color of poetically-charged instances (in-stances) that expand and contract as prisms through visions both Holy and wholly.
Practice your rhapsodomancy. Mark the keystones. Peek through the glass between ekphrasis and isness, then drink from it. What brings you here and what do you thirst for? Speak to the tea leaves at the bottom of your readerly cup. Ask them about infusion, about the agony of the leaf. Look closely at the words given to you, then let them give themselves over to you, or back to you:
Here, said she, is your card,
the view still remains to be written.
This book can take you to the
“things that are unnamed”
in your mirror, if you let it. Let it.
—Jason Adam Sheets
About ROBYN LEIGH LEAR
Robyn Leigh Lear is the creative director for April Gloaming poetry, associate professor, and poet living in Nashville, TN. She is currently finalizing her second manuscript, Yonderling, written under the mentorship of Diane Seuss.
