Tees Valley Publishers

Smokestack Books

Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.

Smokestack's list includes books by Martin Rowson, Linda France, Katrina Porteous, Alison Fell, Kevin Cadwallender and Sebastian Barker. Smokestack's international list includes Victor Jara (Chile), Martín Espada (Puerto Rico), Francis Combes (France), Kristin Dimitrova (Bulgaria), Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela), Jim Scully (USA) and Andras Mezei (Hungary), as well as new editions of radical classics by Heinrich Heine and Nicola Vaptsarov. Coming soon from Smokestack are books by Rocco Scotellaro (Italy) Giannis Ritsos (Greece).

‘Ah-oh, smokestack lightning, shinin' just like gold, Why don't ya hear me cryin'?' Howling Wolf

‘and on every side smokestacks were dancing on rooftops.' Vladimir Mayakovsky

‘The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack... 
Type of the modern-emblem of motion and power-pulse of the continent, 
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse.' Walt Whitman

‘Smokestack is doing an excellent job' (Penniless Press)

'Smokestack books is a welcome addition to the poetry publishing world.' (Critical Survey)

‘don't assume that books from left of centre Middlesbrough press Smokestack will be about whippets and Federation ale.' (Sphinx)

‘Smokestack has a great squad of radical poets.' (Adrian Mitchell)

Contact Details:
w: www.smokestack-books.co.uk
t: +44 (0) 1642 813997
e:  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
PO Box 408, Middlesbrough, TS5 6WA

LATEST PUBLICATIONS

Martin Rowson, The Limerickiad: Volume 1, from Gilgamesh to Shakespeare
ISBN 978-0-9568144-2-5
£9.99 hardback
Every week for the last five years, award-winning cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson has been telling the story of World Literature in The Independent on Sunday. In limericks. With scrupulous regard to the rigours of the limerick form, Rowson has reduced the classics to a series of bad jokes, cheap puns, strained scansion, excruciatingly contrived rhymes and pure filth. Collected together for the first time, The Limerickiad: Volume 1 takes us from the Sumerian classic Gilgamesh to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, with both verse and illustration displaying Rowson's reverence for the original texts. The Limerickiad promises to do for Literature what 1066 and All That did for History.

Martín Espada (ed) His Hands Were Gentle: Selected Lyrics of Victor Jara

ISBN 978-0-9568144-1-8

£8.95

His Hands Were Gentle brings together, for the first time in both Spanish and English, the best of Víctor Jara's lyrics, from early songs like ‘El arado' to ‘Estadio Chile' written in the hours before his execution there. They reveal Jara as an ardent political poet, an eloquent advocate for the peasantry from which he arose, a socialist visionary and a poetic balladeer of the highest order.

Translations by Martín Espada, Eduardo Embry, John Green, Joan Jara and Adrian Mitchell.

Foreword by Joan Jara, Preface by Emma Thompson, Introduction by Martín Espada.

Steven Blyth, Both

ISBN 978-0-9568144-3-2

£7.95

Steven Blyth writes in praise of domesticity, of the triumphs and failures of a lifedefined by family, friends, work and love. Both is partly a hymn to a 1970s childhood spent in Sunday-school and school, playgrounds and parks, to old girlfriends, parents, neighbours, uncles, great grandmas and aunts ‘three-million times removed'. It's also a book about Masculinity and Class, family Christmases and Corporate Strategy meetings.

Pauline Plummer, From Here to Timbuktu

ISBN 978-0-9568144-4-9

£7.95

From Here to Timbuktu follows the fortunes of a group of tourists as they make their way by 4x4 and pinasse across the Mali desert. Like Chaucer's pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, these travellers pass the time bickering, gossiping, flirting and falling out, eventually sharing the stories of their lives with humour and pathos. Written in Chaucer's rime royal, From Here to Timbuktu is a book about Third World poverty and First World consumption.

John Gibbens, Orpheus Ascending

ISBN 978-0-9568144-5-6

£7.95

Orpheus Ascending tells the story of the singer who falls dangerously in love, of the beautiful woman who becomes all things to him, and of the underworld king who claims her for his own. It tells how she is abducted and how the hero goes through hell to find her. John Gibbens recasts the Orpheus myth in contemporary terms, this time in a strangely altered version of the London music scene in the late 1980s, a retro-future where violent unrest meets government backlash and where pastoral idyll becomes a precarious refuge from the perilous currents of history.

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