Books

Janine's sonnet, Another Country, is included in the anthology Poetry and Settled Status for All, published by Civic Leicester.

It is reviewed in Cambridge University's Varsity.

Janine chats with Pippa from Five Leaves about writing, politics, motivation, lockdown, poetry and much more. Warning: may contain poetry and book extracts!

Attila the Stockbroker gives his endorsement to CoronaVerses: poems from the pandemic. (Well, he does have a couple of poems in it!)

And now for a passionate entreaty to buy a fantastic book of poetry.

Click here to read this very positive review.

In this article, prominent poetry website Write Out Loud champions the anthology and asks me a few pertinent questions.

Buy the ebook online here!

This book is emerging in the UK at the very beginning of April 2020.

Coronavirus has already killed over two thousand people in this country and many thousands more around the world.

Published in Solidarity 536, 26 February 2020

I continue to enjoy Janine Booth’s poetry for its humanity. Her latest collection Fighting Tories: The Force Awakens develops compelling political ideas out of personal experiences and observations.

This book is a must for all health care workers - doctors, nurses, students, caterers, cleaners, porters - the team needed by patients facing The Big C.
Stage 2a, stage 3b, stage 4 are numbers which tell us about diagnoses and planning treatment.The numbers do not tell us about who is on zero hours contracts or in insecure housing at risk of losing work and home, who is fretting about bus fares, who is caring for children or parents, the disruption to study and relationships, the time, the time, the time.
This book does tell us about people, the numbers and the NHS. Read it for your patients and yourself, to celebrate our part in this amazing service which is there for everyone when people need it.
Dr Coral Jones, GP and Chair of Hackney South and Shoreditch Labour Party

POETIC JUSTICE?

by Janine Booth

A wise person once said that when there is a tragedy, a lot of poetry is written. The Grenfell Tower fire is no exception, as the new anthology, 'Poems for Grenfell Tower’ illustrates.

But the Grenfell Tower fire was not just a ‘tragedy’: it was an entirely avoidable mass killing, in which people died because they were working-class, in a building that had been clad in flammable material to save money and improve the view for its rich Kensington neighbours. Many of the poems in this book reflect that truth. It is an angry book as well as a sad one.

Buy it here.
 

The London Underground Public Private Partnership (PPP) was one of the biggest political cons in post war British history. It squandered billions of pounds of taxpayers' money, leaving a legacy of cuts, job insecurity and high fares.
Yet as with all struggles the battle around the PPP produced positives. The fact the trade unions eventually won and were proven right has lessons for us today in the debate about how we resist austerity and fight for a better society. This book is an important conribution to the history of the PPP and that wider debate.
Bob Crow, General Secretary, RMT, 2001-2014