Michael Shepler, DARK ROOM ELEGIES

Dark Room Elegies tells the extraordinary story of Tina Modotti (1896-1942), the beautiful Hollywood silent screen star who became a revolutionary photographer, documenting the works of the Mexican muralists and appearing in several paintings by Diego Rivera. Expelled from Mexico, she travelled to Europe and the USSR. She helped organize Red Aid during the Spanish Civil War. Pablo Neruda composed Modotti’s epitaph, part of which was engraved on her tombstone. Dark Room Elegies is a book about art and politics, love and revolution, idealism and power, from Hollywood and Mexico to Moscow and the battlefields of Spain.

Michael Shepler is the author of seven books of poetry including Red Windows and Angel’s Flight. Until recently he taught film at the Jazz School in Berkeley, California. He is poetry editor of the magazine Political Affairs.

Paperback £7.95 ISBN 978-0-9554028-9-0
http://www.smokestack-books.co.uk/

Julian Colton, EVERYMAN STREET

There is an Everyman Street in every town. It’s anonymous, familiar and home-sweet home for winners and losers, for the lost and the lucky, the stuck-in-a-rut and the just-passing-through, for the butcher, the baker and the trouble-maker. Between the old snooker-hall and the new art-centre, Everyman Street is a front-line of class, violence, love and religious intolerance. When Anwar opens a corner shop he sets in motion a series of tragic events which leave Everyman Street and its inhabitants changed forever. Everyman Street is a book of poems. It is a soap-opera, a radio-play and a tragedy.

Julian Colton lives in Selkirk in the Scottish Borders with his wife and three children. Previous publications include Something for the Weekend (2001), Two Che Guevaras (2007) and a book of ghost stories for children, The Looking Glass Years (2004