Description
Rebecca Hurst’s debut pamphlet is woven through with fairy tales, folklore and landscape. She uses the natural world, family mythology and the theory of fairy tales to unpack, embroider, and explode traditional tales and tropes, exploring themes of voice, concealment, and transformation.
Prickling with magic and spells, the poems in The Fox’s Wedding lead us down a twisty path to find – what? A prince made of needles? A cursed box? A golden key? Take care and keep your wits about you; if you’re lucky you might just find your way home.
About the illustrator
Reena Makwana is a London-based illustrator creating illustrations using drawings, embroidery and print. Her work is influenced by the city, characters, creatures, social past and present. She has produced work for clients including Vittles, Pit Magazine, Endeavour Agency, Lecker, Big Family Press, OOMK and At The Table. Visit her website here: reenamakwana.com
More from Rebecca Hurst
Poems in bath magg.
Praise for The Fox’s Wedding
‘Hurst knows the origins and psychology of fairy tales like the back of her hand. Numbers are magical, as are doors, golden keys, goose girls, the crone at her spindle, the cottage in the forest, the scuffed red shoes. Round and round we go with no escape, no way out. We are trapped in the spell of the tale like a spinning magic lantern show, or the play of light and shadow in the wood.’ – Louise Warren, London Grip
‘If you can imagine Angela Carter, but a reined in, hyper-controlled Carter, where every word is perfect and carries superbly judged weight and musicality – this collection is precisely that. These are fairy stories that dig back into narratives of blood and skin and teeth, where happy endings are de-railed and deconstructed.‘ – Cathi Rae, Everybody’s Reviewing
‘Hurst weaves together, and subtly unravels, “the memetics of fairy tales” from frog princes to gingerbread boys. Full of folklore and forested states of being, The Fox’s Wedding is a beguiling feat of whimsy and wonder.’ – PBS Summer Bulletin 2022
‘It is hard to think of a writer more alive to the animal in us than Rebecca Hurst, in her striking first pamphlet, The Fox’s Wedding. The Emma Press, I feel, has blazed a trail in its enthusiasm for illustration. Reena Makwana’s grey ghosts of boars and honeysuckle are a shadowy counterpoint to the drama of Rebecca Hurst’s words. And how wild these poems are! In Hurst’s charmed borderland of imagination, animal and human, story and song, anything can happen, and frequently does…’ – Alison Brackenbury, I DARED
