Carcanet online book launch: The Iron Bridge by Rebecca Hurst

We’re very excited about the launch of Rebecca Hurst’s debut poetry collection The Iron Bridge, published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press. The online event will feature a reading from the text and a chat about the book with host, poet Sarah Hesketh.

Spanning memory and observation, Rebecca Hurst’s first collection, The Iron Bridge, noting the detail of the natural world and our changing relation to it, picking up on themes explored in her beautifully illustrated debut poetry pamphlet, The Fox’s Wedding. Here’s some blurb about The Iron Bridge: “The book’s places are made familiar by walking. It encounters other worlds alive with new and recovered ideas and images – from the folk traditions of her Sussex childhood, to archival encounters with a nineteenth-century nurse-explorer, and her undergraduate training as a Kremlinologist. Her language is deeply rooted, as keenly aware of etymologies as of history. Shaped by myth, history and desire, the poems of The Iron Bridge are theatrical, fierce, music-infused.”

Rebecca Hurst is a writer, opera-maker, illustrator and researcher based in Greater Manchester. Her poetry has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII. She is the author of a poetry pamphlet, The Fox’s Wedding (The Emma Press, 2022). Rebecca has a PhD from the University of Manchester, and is co-founder of the Voicings Collective, an ensemble that devises new music theatre, and teaches creative writing in schools, universities, museums, and the community.

Sarah Hesketh is a writer and editor. She is the author of the poetry collections Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf (Penned in the Margins, 2009) and The Hard Word Box (Penned in the Margins, 2014), and the editor of The Emma Press Anthology of Age (2015). She has been an artist-in-residence with Age Concern and The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Her work has a focus on socially engaged writing practices. She currently lives in London and works as managing editor for Modern Poetry in Translation.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.