The Words of Others are All We Have is a poetry conversation between Louise Machen and J. Daniel West illustrating working class landscapes in an era of gentrification and widening social disparity.
This collection traverses the topographies of the city and its surrounding suburbs, examining the contradictions that arise in the relationships between people and the places that provide a familiar comfort whilst surreptitiously encouraging a coalescence with the inability to escape economic and emotional deprivation.
These poems are rooted in the everyday, in the discord between the metropolis and the natural world, in the importance of our 'root networks' and the realities of class restriction. From terraced streets to high-rise flats and glass monoliths to nostalgic landmarks, this conversation of poetry discusses experiences of childhood, adolescence and aging in the urban sprawl of the north.
 
30 pages. Publisher Hedgehog Poetry, 2024.