8 Books Published by Bloodaxe Books on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about The Verandah Poems by Jean “Binta” Breeze The Verandah Poems

by Jean “Binta” Breeze
Bloodaxe Books (Mar 11, 2016)
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The Verandah Poems was both a departure and a return for Jean “Binta” Breeze, who left her village in Jamaica to become an internationally renowned Dub poet and storyteller. This is a book of coming home and coming to terms, of contemplation rather than contention - of mellow, musing, edgy poems drawn from the life and lives around her. It was Breeze’s first new collection after Third World Girl: Selected Poems (2011), and was published on her 60th birthday. Foreword by Kei Miller. With photographs by Tehron Royes.


Click for more detail about Third World Girl: Selected Poems (With Live Readings DVD) by Jean “Binta” Breeze Third World Girl: Selected Poems (With Live Readings DVD)

by Jean “Binta” Breeze
Bloodaxe Books (Jun 30, 2011)
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Jean “Binta” Breeze was a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances wee so powerful she was called a ’one-woman festival’. Her poems are Caribbean songs of innocence and experience, of love and conflict. They use personal stories and historical narratives to explore social injustice and the psychological dimensions of black women’s experience. Striking evocations of childhood in the hills of Jamaica give way to explorations of the perils and delights of growth and change - through sex, emigration, motherhood and age.

Introduced by renowned critic Colin MacCabe, the book brings together new poems with poetry and reggae chants from four previous collections: Riddym Ravings, Spring Cleaning, On the Edge of an Island and The Arrival of Brighteye. Many of the poems are included on the accompanying DVD featuring two Jean “Binta” Breeze performances filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce at Leicester’s Y Theatre, plus an interview with Jane Dowson.


Click for more detail about Lara: The Family Is Like Water by Bernardine Evaristo Lara: The Family Is Like Water

by Bernardine Evaristo
Bloodaxe Books (Oct 22, 2009)
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Booker Prize winner’s debut semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse based on her own childhood and family history. It explores the lives of those who leave one country in search of a better life elsewhere, but who end up struggling to be accepted even as they lay the foundations for their children and future generations.


Click for more detail about Darling: New & Selected Poems by Jackie Kay Darling: New & Selected Poems

by Jackie Kay
Bloodaxe Books (Oct 10, 2007)
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Humour, Gender, Sexuality, Sensuality, Identity, Racism, and Cultural Difference. When do any of these things ever come together to equal poetry? When Jackie Kay’s part of the equation. Darling brings together into a vibrant new book many favourite poems from her four Bloodaxe collections, The Adoption Papers, Other Lovers, Off Colour and Life Mask, as well as featuring new work, some previously uncollected poems, and some lively poetry for younger readers. Kay’s poems draw on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding.

The title of her acclaimed short story collection, Why Don’t You Stop Talking, could be a comment on her own poems, their urgency of voice and their recognition of the urgency in all voice, particularly the need to be heard, to have voice. And what voice - the voices of the everyday, the voices of jazz, the voices of this many-voiced United Kingdom.


A Cappella: Live Poetry

by Linton Kwesi Johnson
Bloodaxe Books (Jul 01, 2007)
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Click for more detail about The Fifth Figure by Jean “Binta” Breeze The Fifth Figure

by Jean “Binta” Breeze
Bloodaxe Books (Sep 28, 2006)
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Jean “Binta” Breeze is a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances are so powerful she has been called a “one-woman festival.” The Fifth Figure is a book-length sequence mixing poetry and prose that chronicles the lives of five generations of Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry.

Part novel, part poem, part family memoir, its structure is based on the Jamaican quadrille, a hybrid version of the dance brought from Europe by the island’s former colonial masters. Beginning in the late 19th century with her great-great grandmother’s first quadrille, Breeze tells a many-layered tale of love and betrayal, innocence and suffering, hardship and joy over a hundred years as each mother sees her daughter join a dance that shapes her life. The Fifth Figure is her fifth book and sees Breeze breathing new life into the dramatic monologue. Steeped in the history of Jamaica, the book develops the possibilities of narrative, voice and rhythm, offering an eloquent and empowering vision of Caribbean lives and culture.


Click for more detail about American Blue by Elizabeth Alexander American Blue

by Elizabeth Alexander
Bloodaxe Books (Jan 01, 2006)
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Book by Alexander , Elizabeth


Click for more detail about The Adoption Papers by Jackie Kay The Adoption Papers

by Jackie Kay
Bloodaxe Books (Oct 24, 1991)
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Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl’s adoption by a white Scottish couple, from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter. Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.