Poetry and prose on experiences of unemployment, the benefits system, disability and work capability assessments.Selected and edited by Alan Morrison and Kate Jay-R.Foreword by John McArdle of the Black Triangle Campaign.
"The Brown Envelope Book feels significant for the way in which it triangulates artistic expression, social experience, and the ideological underpinnings that create and contour that experience... a book so rare in its creative energy, and so profound in its political implications."
Fran Lock, Culture Matters
"This is poetry as protest, rebellion, testament, analysis and sheer agonised pain"
Steve Spence, Litter Magazine
"Will the Minister recommend that his colleagues purchase and read the recently released e-book, The Brown Envelope Book, which contains more than 200 poems, pieces of prose and short plays about disabled people who say they have been “brutalised by the bureaucracy of the Department for Work and Pensions”?"
This is a big, important book, coming at a time when the national inclination is to boo George Osborne, to his great astonishment, at the Paralympic Games. Its rallying point is the campaign for a Robin Hood, or Tobin tax on financial transactions, and follows last year’s radical anthology, Emergency Verse. But, as editor Alan Morrison is happy to point out, inevitably its sweep is far wider than that, prompted by a “wide range of political convictions: socialists, communists, anti-capitalists, anarchists, Greens”, and its underlying ethic being defence of the welfare state. Interestingly, within its pages is also a polemic about the state of poetry in Britain today, which takes in last year’s big bust-up at the Poetry Society, and the Poetry Book Society’s acceptance of sponsorship from a hedge fund.
The Robin Hood Book, unlike a number of collections of poetry, makes you feel included, not excluded. It is also the first time I’ve come across the glorious term “lumpenpoetariat”. Where do we sign?Greg Freeman, Write Out Loud
Provoking, entertaining, moving and heartening, it is an extraordinarily rich selection of funny, angry, polemical, satirical, sad and wise poetry ...a huge and hugely important book... Andy Croft, Morning Star
Here is a handbook for everyone who wants to make the case against the Coalition. I can’t recommend it highly enough...Disability Arts Online
