HIDE: A MANUSCRIPT
Rebecca Hawkes’ HIDE is poetry like you've never seen before.
Presented across a series of intricately illuminated cards held in a decorated sleeve, HIDE combines the author's practices as a poet and visual artist.
In HIDE, the bodily histories of book-making are bound in blood. The interwoven stories of a medieval mystic scribe and a modern shepherd's daughter span centuries in one illuminated poem. Probing wounds, painting healing words, peeling skins from lambs and stealing kisses under eclipses, these characters test the limits of devotion.
Inspired by a 1600s Latin riddle from the Tatwine Enigma that describes the transformation of a slain animal's hide into parchment that holds healing words, this chapbook contains both brutality and transcendent beauty.
HIDE is this year’s singular offering from ngā pukapuka pekapeka, an Ōtautahi-based micropress who have annually published 3 short collections (chapbooks) of poetry and fiction since 2024, showcasing “chapbooks that push the boundaries on the page and the stage”.
Reviews
"Utterly beautiful. It's a really incredible poem. I've read it twice now, and it's one of those stories that you'll get a lot out of the more you read it, and the more you consider the images alongside the text […] It's a really loaded publication with lots of symbols; beauty, but also brutality and that cycle of life and death; how stories have emerged for so many years on skin."
"Like no poetry collection I've seen."
“If you're a poetry person, this will be a collector's item.”
Hybrid performance work
Launch events for HIDE feature a musical performance of this book-length poem accompanied by medieval chant and catgut strings, composed by Emily Winter on cello and Tony DiCarlo with voice.
The author's sculpture of sheepskin, pearls, and painted canvas looms large behind the work, its wound dripping glass beads under stage lights.
Launches have been held in Christchurch at Little Andromeda, and Wellington as part of the Verb Wellington literary festival.
