Assembly Lines

By Jane Commane

Assembly Lines asks what it means to be here and now, in post-industrial towns and cities of the heartlands that are forever on the periphery. From schools and workplaces and lives lived in ‘a different town, just like this’, these poems take a historical perspective on the present day from the ground upwards – whether the geological strata that underpins a ‘dithering island’ or the ever-moving turf under a racehorses’ hooves.

This is a new Midlands realism, precision-engineered, which seeks wonderment in unlikely places. By turns both fierce and tender, the poems in Jane Commane’s first book-length collection re-assemble the landscape, offer up an alternative national curriculum and find ghosts and strange magic in the machinery of the everyday. Between disappearances and reformations, the natural and the man-made, the lines are drawn; you might try to leave your hometown, but it will never leave you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780374093

Jane Commane

Jane Commane is a poet, editor and publisher. Her first full-length collection, Assembly Lines, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, for a decade she also worked in museums and archives and in 2016 she was chosen to join Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 writer development programme Jane is editor at Nine Arches Press, co-editor of Under the Radar magazine, and is co-author, with Jo Bell, of How to Be a Poet, a creative writing handbook (Nine Arches Press).In 2017, she was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. In 2019, Jane was commissioned by Historic England and the Poetry Society as part of the Where Light Falls project to write a poem alongside community groups which was projected onto the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and viewed by over 15,000 people over three nights as part of a music, poetry and light installation.

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