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.
 
PRAISE for Strange sons, dangerous daughters:
This is a perfect book for those nights where the world is full of darkness and mystery and there is some kind of old, powerful magic in the air.
   — Daniel Handler
 
Imogen Russell Williams' brilliant new re-telling (re-dreaming) of the Mabinogi grips, fascinates and unsettles. In its snap-cutting between perspectives, voices and species, in its sanguineous bites and vivid visions, and in its branching, antlered form, it somehow finds a way to breathe in the ancient and exhale the modern. Strange, eerie and animate, it morphs and metamorphs on the page and in the mind.
   — Robert Macfarlane
 
Beautiful, original, vivid, sexy, angry, intelligent, wise
   — Katherine Rundell
 
…Elegant, properly spare and focused, but also full of very physical sensation, really vivid evocations of stuff and smell and touch
   — Rowan Williams
 
…Fierce and bloody and fleshy; cleverly singling out key moments, always maintaining the momentum and getting to the human heart of the matter
   — Kevin Crossley-Holland
 
Unique, enchanting, otherworldly, in a league of its own
   — Laura Dockrill 
 
It's absolutely compelling - vivid, twisted, empathic, strange and disturbing. I love the way that each 'branch' is related three times - as a normal narrative, then in sparse sentences like pared bones that show you the story anew, then through the visceral, lyrical poems, telling the story from beneath the skin and making it breathe.
   — Frances Hardinge 
 
ABOUT Imogen Russell Williams:
Imogen Russell Williams is a half-Indian, half-Welsh autistic literary critic and author. Her poetry has been widely anthologised and she is the co-author of Kitty and Mary, an epistolary sequel to Pride and Prejudice, as well as two forthcoming nonfiction books for children on world folklore. Strange sons, dangerous daughters is her second full-length collection.