The North Recommends: Poetry Book Society

Spring has finally sprung in Newcastle and we can’t wait to share our latest poetry highlights. Here are four of our favourite Poetry Book Society Spring Selections so far:

Rachael Allen – Kingdomland (Faber)

The PBS Spring Choice is a striking debut by a York-based Northern Writer’s Award Winner. Kingdomland presents a “slanted” world of surreal and scalded visions, suffused with violence. Allen topples the ”tower of masks” to reveal the “damp” kitchen of domestic abuse and a landscape of dead women who won’t die quietly.

(Penned in the Margins) 

As heretical as it is cerebral, WITCH rages ferociously through the occult to the obscene. From hexes on patriarchy to a spell for UN resolutions, Tamás upturns the world as we know it into “a small bright filthy song”. A fierce new voice, “red and pulsing”, which refuses to be silenced. 

(Cape)

This brave and brutal book brings Greek mythology into the #Metoo era, exposing Zeus as a sex offender. The second part deals in quieter domesticity, the tender brutality of childbirth and slow return of Spring’s “green havoc”. The “whole wild edge” of life hangs in the balance of this formally innovative and thematically challenging PBS Wild Card Choice. 

(Carcanet) 

A “carefree yet salty” collection of poems in which the world is regularly “repurposed into handy snacks”. Yeh declares: “I decanted my sincerity into a carefully-labelled trunk”, but there is something heartfelt beneath the hilarity. Quirky, meta and self-mocking in equal measure, Yeh’s “poetic cockapoos will serenade us with their thoughts”. 

 

You can catch Rebecca Tamás and Rachael Allen reading in Newcastle on the 21st of March at the PBS Spring Showcase and NCLA’s Newcastle Poetry Festival Programme Launch. Join the Poetry Book Society today for 10% off your spring poetry parcel using the code NWNSPRING19 at www.poetrybooks.co.uk.