Poet Jackie Kay’s new collection reflects on several decades of her political activism, from her Glasgow childhood, accompanying her parents on Socialist campaigns, through the feminist, LGBT+ and anti-racist movements of the 1980s and 1990s, to the present day when a global pandemic intersects with the urgency of Black Lives Matter. Her writing brings to life a cast of influential figures – Jamaican model Fanny Eaton, muse of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England; singer and Marxist academic Angela Davis; and poet and civil rights campaigner Audre Lorde. Woven through are lyric poems on the loss of Kay’s parents: poems of grief infused with the light of love and celebration.
