Tattoo is narrative, signifier, art work, more. In this rich collection Kate Noakes explores the cultural meanings and stories permanently etched on our skin.
‘Tattoos are for the desperate – chavs, misguided youths, deluded slebs, right? But you can’t escape them and after reading Kate Noakes’s poems you may be encouraged to let your imagination fly when next in the supermarket queue, on the Tube, in the restaurant. There are stories and significances beyond the crude iconography, as her poems cunningly reveal – “a tattoo that pulses with the heartbeat”’ --Tony Curtis‘This is Kate Noakes’ most powerful collection yet. Ravens, scorpions, serpents, swine take life on the ground of the body in intricate poems made, like the tattoos themselves, from sharp, sensuous scoring and patterning, on the skin and beneath it’ --Jane Draycott
Tattoo on Crow Street is Kate Noakes’ fifth collection of poetry. Her website boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com is archived by the National Library of Wales. She lives and writes in Paris and London.