Modern Tarot

Beloved literary iconoclast Michelle Tea reinvents tarot for a new generation in this guide to using the tarot as a twenty-first-century tool for connecting with our higher selves. Long before Michelle Tea was winning awards for her poignant memoirs, she was a scrappy misfit on the streets of San Francisco, supporting herself by giving eerily prescient tarot readings. As her reputation as a writer grew, she stopped publicly reading the tarot, though she never stopped doing it privately.

Based on over twenty-five years of experience and a deep love of the cards, Modern Tarot brings the full force of Tea’s unique insight, inviting pop sensibility, and wicked humor to bear on the tradition of the tarot in a fascinating journey through the cards that teaches us how to use this tradition for radical self-growth. Whether you’re a dyed-in-the-wool seeker or a digital-age skeptic—or a little of both—the power of tarot is open to you.

Modern Tarot doesn’t require you to believe in the supernatural or to focus narrowly on using the tarot as a divination tool. Instead, it offers fiercely insightful descriptions of each of the seventy-eight cards in the tarot system (each one fully illustrated by Amanda Verwey) and specially designed rituals to guide readers on a path toward transformative personal growth. Grounded in Tea’s decades of tarot wisdom and personal experience, this is a guide that beginners will fall in love with and experienced readers will learn from anew.

With her trademark one-of-a-kind insight and wit, Tea shows how tarot offers moments of deep, authentic connection during a time when “connection” is ubiquitous but rarely delves beneath the surface—and how the affirming and personal nature of the tarot offers a spiritual experience that is gentle, individual, and aspirational.