Hollow Key Press is the imprint of multimedia artist & author, Evvie "Evvin" Marin,
publishing independent works in the intersection of the lyrical, the queer, and the esoteric.
Releases:
As guidebook to the decks, glyphs, spreads, and blog that comprise the Interrobang Tarot ecosystem, Fortune's Inkwell uses a one-room-schoolhouse approach to deliver innovative, irreverent, and advanced tarot material with the scaffolding of a warm and playful primer fit for readers and diviners of any level. Here, folk-esoterica and queer reversals braid together with practical approaches so grounded, they're underground. Designed with diverse creative misfits in mind, this book aims to support the reader's own crafty resilience, adaptive wisdom, and visionary experiences of the ever-evolving arcana. What is Fortune's gift? And who is the Nothing Key? Come enter the Bell House, sit down by the well, and find out….
​
It’s a bright bell for a slight house of wood and weathered paint, equal parts rickety and prim for as long as it’s been, which is indeterminate.
Inside, a fire the color of lantanas and cheap guitars glows in the tiny brick hearth behind measured rows of sloping desks, whose seats each curve like a cross between a park bench and a sleigh. Every etch-able surface of this place is carved in a scratchy palimpsest of names faded illegible, lone words once savored obsessively, and symbols long detached from all memory of their meanings. The inkwells are loaded, fresh, and dark and deep. Wooden floorboards squeal beneath the ghosts whose hazy bodies rustle soft as the barometer’s mercury. A group of child ghosts should be called a cackle. A cackle of students and a whisper of teachers cackle and whisper now for your benefit. They were Fools, all and always. This is how we occult....
Vanitas
& Other Sticky Kitsch
​
Cosmos, they called the observable bounds, after kósmos, meaning world, but also ornament.
Vanity, they called all the stuff on the ground, after vanus, meaning trifling, but also Void.
Once upon the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Dutch elites commissioned master artists to paint lavish still lives of their riches, arranged nicely with human skulls, snuffed candles, rotting fruit, and other memento mori symbols. All this to recall that earthly life is ashen and senseless compared to the afterlife, so we’d best not get too precious about these fleeting, pretty things (preserved for all posterity in gilded frames above the banquet table.) The paintings were opulent, grim, Baroque, high-brow campy, and goth as Hell. So pious, it burns….
Vanitas & Other Sticky Kitsch rummages through the curio cupboards of haunted memory and macabre history. Let’s throw ourselves doomed searches for meaning in artifice, hedonism, and play-pretend psychometry. Let’s bum around with ghosts and call it research. Let’s find saucier ways to parade our confusion as we trace how we got here. Let’s follow the Dead Man’s Compass, locate ourselves within history, and chart surreal, new maps to follow.
Let’s watch a rotting thing turn beautiful.
The poetry and illustrations in this collection meditate on decadence and vanity, in every possible sense of the word, but especially as it recalls the splendor, urgency, sweet futility, and brevity of life. Here lies decorative grief for the autumn of an ailing society, and for you who have Seen Things.
​
Lavishly decorated with 15 full color illustrations.
​​
Out on ebook! The print edition drops November 7, 2024.
Tidal Locks
& Other Tales You Told So Long
You Can't Tell What They Mean
Welcome to Holistic, Lush Dysphoria! We’ve got Skee-ball!
Tidal Locks is a salty, playfully anachronistic glimpse into the private diaries of an irreverent contemplative and amiable recluse. An illustrated blend of fiction and confession, Marin’s poetry remixes the hallucinatory symbolism of folklore, natural history, occultism, and dream to explore the deep surrealism, haunted beauty, queer urgency, and mundane heartaches of waking life in a decaying world.
​
We built this gate and kept it locked.
We tethered up and linked the knots
Until our knuckles polished down to bone.
We named the battened outfit Reassurance,
And we rested reassured we were alone . . .
​
​Tidal Locks blends melancholic brinewifery with gleeful, modern hipster trash in an attic’s stash of verse, written in secret over the course of fourteen years, published for the apocalypse.
​
Lavishly decorated with 15 full color illustrations.
​
The revised and expanded second edition is now out on ebook!
The print edition drops November 6, 2024.