Smokestack Books exhibition

Smokestack Books (2004-24) was an independent publisher of radical poetry based in Middlesbrough, later in North Yorkshire, and run by poet Andy Croft. The aim of Smokestack Books was to keep open a space for what is left of the radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century and they championed left-field poets working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. This exhibition will share images of over two hundred of the books they published.

Smokestack was interested in the World as well as the Word; believed that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argued that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.

Smokestack's list included books by John Berger, Linda France, Michael Rosen, Katrina Porteous, Ian McMillan, Kate Fox, Martin Rowson, Ian Duhig, Pnina Shinebourne, Sebastian Barker, Gerda Stevenson, Martin Hayes and Steve Ely.

Their international list included books by poets in Algeria, Australia, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Chile, El Salvador, France, Greece, Germany (Bertolt Brecht), Guyana, Hungary, Iraq, Italy, the Netherlands, Palestine, Poland, Puerto Rico, Russia, the Soviet Union, Spain, Syria, Turkey, the United States, and Venezuela.

Smokestack also published anthologies of poetry from Palestine, Siberia, the USA, France, Algeria, the Soviet Union, Scotland, Greece, Russia, Kurdistan and Cuba.

Visit their website for more information on Smokestack Books [external link]