Two of Pentacles, by Allison Parrish [PREORDER]

A meditation on the eponymous Tarot card, Two of Pentacles is a book of ever-changing juxtapositions. Each printed copy of the book is uniquely generated and shuffled such that each two-page spread resembles a freshly drawn spread of cards. Its poetic "cards" draw unexpected connections between the legend of Narcissus, Tarot, botnets, the Bible, and language itself.

Two of Pentacles is the first in the Nothing to Say series of “dynamic books” where each copy is uniquely generated and printed.

"Reading Allison Parrish feels like being let in on a fundamental secret of language. Two of Pentacles locates the mystical in the realm of the ordinary: the moment one text passes into and as another. This book demonstrates both that nothing is ever just itself and that the self is a “meaningful surface” on which we experience words, earthly things, and the otherworldly experience known as one another."

— charles theonia, author of Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax

"The Two of Pentacles is the juggler who plays with the wild doubleness of all things. In Pamela Colman Smith's design, the two magic coins are bound by an infinite loop, each ready to be spun around the other. Here, Allison Parrish proves herself the Two's great interpreter, pairing and repairing interpretations of the binary in a perpetual spiral of shifting ideas. At the very moment when the digital oligarchs of the new gilded age are competing to create the most efficiently exploitable text engine, Parrish is working an older technical magic, making thought strange again. As ever, her procedural systems are artful and precise, seeking not general intelligence but a deep investigation of one local constellation of words. She works with the meaning machine of tarot as both querent and reader, offering a new way to think, to think about thinking, and to pass through thought."

— Harry Josephine Giles, author of Deep Wheel Orcadia and Them!

Cover art by Ian O'Hara
Interior illustrations by Taeyoon Choi