Assembly Lines asks what it means to be here & now in post-industrial towns & cities of the heartlands that are forever on the periphery From schools & workplaces & lives lived in 'a different town just like this' these poems take a historical perspective on the present day from the ground upwards
- whether the geological strata that underpins a 'dithering island' or the ever-moving turf under a racehorses' hooves This is a new Midlands realism precision-engineered which seeks wonderment in unlikely places By turns both fierce & tender the poems in Jane Commane's first book-length collection re-assemble the landscape offer up an alternative national curriculum & find ghosts & strange magic in the machinery of the everyday Between disappearances & reformations the natural & the man-made the lines are drawn; you might try to leave your hometown but it will never leave you