A new collection of poems from British poet, Ian Parks. This new collection features poems about the tensions between poetry and politics, the spoken and the unspoken, the public and the private. Accompanied by the ghosts of Ella Fitzgerald, Honeyboy Edwards, and the Chartist Poets Ebenezer Elliott and Ernest Jones, Parks listens to 'the language of the lost and dispossessed' as he explores sites of painful historic events. The book asks questions about class and identity - personal and collective, regional and national - about the responsibilities of the individual in the face of state oppression, and what it might mean to be a citizen rather than a subject.