And If I Go With Child?

RITONA is pleased to announce the publication of And If I Go With Child? : Re-imagining the Mysteries of Tam Lin, by poet Charlotte Hussey.

'His boneless fingers bend

to conjure newborn shapes

from perturbed clouds of matter,

a slippery, pink brood they fall

all around, or from me?

I wake, hands crossed

over my heart.'

Through twenty-seven poems, Charlotte Hussey explores the initiatory potential of the ancient Scottish faery story, "The Ballad of Tam Lin."

The ballad tells the tale of a woman's haunting encounter with a figure trapped by the Faerie Queen. In And If I Go With Child?, Charlotte Hussey becomes the story itself, and speaks beautifully in her poems of the power of redemptive love.