Strange sons, dangerous daughters

Strange sons, dangerous daughters: Four Branches of the Mabinogi by Imogen Russell Williams is a sustained poetic engagement with the medieval Welsh prose tales, refracted through a contemporary feminist intelligence. Russell Williams works in sequences that move between mortal and divine, human and animal, those who act and those acted upon, voicing not only Rhiannon, Branwen, Goewin, Arianrhod, and Blodeuedd, but also the stag, the dog, the starling, the mare, the gallows, and the mouse. Accompanied by Chris Riddell's illustrations, the collection reckons with the cruelty embedded in inherited story while restoring weight to figures the source narratives leave bruised or unheard.