Released April 30th, 2024 // 40 pages // 978-1-916938-15-1 // RRP £8.99
 
Chalking the Pavement, written during the first part of the Covid pandemic, includes a number of poems, as well as a long extract from Kate Noakes’ daily writings, which take the form of prose poems. Noakes aims to capture the soon-forgotten details of the changes to our lives during this extraordinary period, when living in the city became something of a prison. 
 
PRAISE for Chalking the Pavement:
For many of us the recent pandemic provided an unforeseen occasion to concentrate on our immediate surroundings and think about what we most need for well-being both physical and spiritual. For Kate Noakes, a lifelong asthma suffer, it brought breathing and inspiration into high relief. Chalking the Pavement reveals how those years inflected her attention to detail, her acute phrasing and fair attitudes. The result is a distinctive contribution to poetry's communal project of transmuting suffering into intelligent pleasure. With these sequenced journal entries and framing poems we can enjoy how she finds a hop, a skip and a jump in the art of drawing breath.
— Peter Robinson
 
Kate Noakes's Chalking the Pavement contributes to the witness and assessment of a the most critical and challenging period of our recent history. In the Covid lock-down the writer's gaze is acute and necessary.
— Tony Curtis
 
ABOUT Kate Noakes:
Kate Noakes has published eight collections of poetry and one non-fiction title, and has been published widely in magazines and journals in the UK, US, and Europe. She earned her doctorate in creative and critical writing from the University of Reading in 2023. Kate founded Paris Lit Up, and for four years was a trustee of Spread the Word. She has taught workshops for Paris Lit Up and the Poetry School amongst others, and reviews for The North, Poetry London, London Grip and other magazines. Of Welsh heritage, she lives in London.