Breaking Silence

Description

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize

Jacob Sam-La Rose has been described as ”a one-man literary industry”. This was Patrick Neate”s comment on the BBC Poetry Season website: ”Passionate about poetry and its power to change people”s lives, he”s a lesson to us all. He”s also a damn fine writer.”

Already well-known on the UK performance circuit, Sam-La Rose has also spent many years working with young people in schools and communities, especially around London. So it will come as a surprise to many that Breaking Silence is his first book-length collection of poetry.

It is a collection that sits on the threshold between the personal and the profound, with eyes on race and dual heritage; masculinity and manhood; definitions and senses of self. Above all, it”s a collection that”s invested in the power of the voice, in the work of giving a voice to issues and entities that would otherwise remain silent. It speaks on divides, from the spaces in between.

Jacob Sam-La Rose”s work is grounded in a belief that poetry can be a powerful force within a community, and that it”s possible to combine the immediacy of poetry in performance with formal rigour and innovation on the page.