"Ah-oh, smokestack lightning
Shinin', just like gold
Why don't ya hear me cryin'?"
Howling Wolf
Smokestack champions poets who are unconventional, unfashionable, radical or left-field and who are working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority.
Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word.
"In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times."
Bertolt Brecht
Smokestack believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society.
"and on every side
smokestacks were dancing on rooftops."
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Smokestack does not think "difficulty" in poetry is a virtue or that poetry is a place in which to hide.
Smokestack argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.
"Smokestack has a great squad of radical poets lined up for its first season. I predict that the team will roll like thunder, strike like lightening and electrify British poetry."
Adrian Mitchell
Childhood smells of gingerbread and hot porridge. It wears red shoes, glass slippers and seven league boots. And everyone lives happily ever after. But it is also a dark wood full of hungry giants, big bad wolves and child-sized ovens... Beans in Snow is not just a brilliant and original re-working of some well-known fairy-tales, it is a book with something profound to say about childhood and growing up.
"urgent, visceral... not for the faint-hearted"
U.A. Fanthorpe
More about Jennifer Copley's Beans in Snow
Kathleen Kenny was brought up in a family where her father and her brother never spoke to each other. Hole is the story of a lifelong struggle to understand the unspoken secrets contained in the silences of her childhood.
More about Hole by Kathleen Kenny
At the beginning of 2006, Linda France set herself the challenge of writing a renga verse every day for twelve months. Adapting the classical Japanese form, she has created a new one, the world's first 'year renga'. Friends, walks, the weather, things seen, heard and read, became her collaborators in 365 word pictures, illustrated by Sue Dunne's striking ceramic fragments - reliefs created by casting flowers, leaves and branches found in the woods and hedgerows of Northumberland as a year unfolds.
More about book of days by Linda France
Full list of Smokestack publications.
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Order Smokestack books from Inpress.
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Central Books,
99 Wallis Road,
London E9 5LN
Telephone: 0845 4589911
To order direct from Smokestack Books (please add 50p postage & packing), or for further information, contact:
PO Box 408,
Middlesbrough TS5 6WA
Telephone: 01642 813997
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Smokestack Books is supported by the Arts Council of England (North East) and Middlesbrough Borough Council.
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Last update: 10th November 2009.