£5 plus £3.00 p. and p. ISBN: 978-1-912710-21-8

Release a Rage of Red is a selection of entries to the Bread & Roses Poetry Award 2019, sponsored by Unite. 

Every year it becomes more of a challenge to judge these poems. This year, there was a large number of beautifully written, often angry, urgent and deeply moving poems on a wide range of compelling issues, including many more entries from women and young people. Our ‘Unite in Schools’ programme takes us round schools to talk to young people about trade unions and the kind of collective action that’s needed to campaign against inequality.

We need to run a version of this fabulous competition in schools, colleges and universities, to support the young activists of tomorrow to creatively express their growing, sharpened sense of inequality, along with support for their ability to self-organise and to harness social media.

 – Mary Sayer, Unite Education Officer

Not only were there many more entries than in previous years, there was also not a weak poem among them. It was good to see so much feeling and argument harnessed to craft and invention. There was also a tremendous range of subjects addressed — inequality, racism, poverty, austerity, environmental destruction, disability, class, gender, education — not as abstract evils, but as lived, felt oppressions.

A lot of these poems express a kind of helpless melancholy about the state of the world. Others are written in anger and shame at what this country has become, but manage to contain their rage and focus their anger to hit precisely described targets.

– Andy Croft, poet and publisher of Smokestack Books