David Keenan & Sophy Hollington - To Run Wild In It

To Run Wild In It is a book about tarot, an experimental novella, a ‘channelled’ text and an extension of ideas first broached in David Keenan’s acclaimed debut novel, This Is Memorial Device. Taking the maxim that the best way to understand the tarot is to create your own, Keenan has reimagined the deck as the unfolding of parallel stories alive with uncanny oracular detail.

In collaboration with the artist Sophy Hollington, the pair have also created an accompanying deck that, while still having an umbilical to the card’s archaic roots, future-visions it as a glam-punk portal deep into the Now. Drawing on influences as diverse as Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Aleister Crowley, Allen Van Newkirk, John Waters, Laura Branigan and Iggy Pop, To Run Wild In It ranges across ideas of art, magick, synchronicity, pop music, dreams, visions, poetry and experimental prose in an attempt to map the possibilities of spontaneous inspiration.

It also functions as a tarot workbook, with deeply personal mediations on the cards’ archetypal energies combined with an intuitive and highly original re-engagement with their divinatory potential. It is also a book about books, an Oulipo-style literary gambit that blurs the line between art and magick in an experiment in poetic consciousness.

David Keenan grew up in Airdrie in the late 1970s. A senior critic for The Wire, he is also the author of two books: England's Hidden Reverse (Strange Attractor) and This Is Memorial Device (Faber & Faber), his debut novel which was a Telegraph and Rough Trade Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2017.

Sophy Hollington is an illustrator and artist living in Brighton. Not being one to cut corners, most of Sophy’s commercial work takes the form of relief prints, created using the lengthy process of lino-cutting. Her personal work tackles themes from meteoric folklore to mannerism; and she’s interested in wrangling the most out-there ideas to make them totally tangible. She’s worked for such clients as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wetransfer and The Poetry Review.

First edition press is limited to 500 copies