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.
