Family Album is preoccupied with migration, journeys and places. In poems full of energy and life, Sheree Mack catches the complexity of family history – ‘it was already there waiting for me’ – the pull of the past and the threads that have formed her identity.

These poems evoke images of sea journeys made from Barbados and Trinidad to England – ‘a place speckled / with a few brown faces’ – and onward travel to Bradford and Newburn on Tyneside.

Sheree Mack’s collection captures a sense of the migrations and changes of the last century, and shares with us, through the control and patterning of her poetry, an experience and insight that is her own.

"Poems that do not flinch from the conflicts and inconsistencies of family bonds."
Cynthia Fuller

"Sharp vignettes of a family with roots in Ghana, Barbados, Trinidad and Tyneside. This is deeply affectionate and very skilful poetry."
Peter Bennet, Other Poetry

"A delightful album of arrivals and departures, births and deaths, fading photographs and bright memories."
Andy Croft, Morning Star

Sheree Mack was born in Bradford to a Trinidadian father and a Geordie mother of Bajan and Ghanaian heritage. She has lived in Newcastle from the age of ten. She was Poet in Residence at the Durham Literature Festival in 2005. Married with two children, she works as a freelance writer and lecturer for the Open University and has recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University.