The Poetry Book Society and Apples & Snakes are delighted to announce that SoundBlast goes live today. This lively new section on the Poetry Bookshop Online is dedicated to CDs from some of the UK’s best performance poets.

http://www.poetrybookshoponline.com/sblast/

In addition to selling all poetry books currently in print in the UK and all 97 of the CDs featured on the Poetry Archive website, the Poetry Book Society’s online bookshop is now extending its range to include CDs from UK-based performance poets, many of which have been sourced by Apples & Snakes. We are also pleased to include in our collection CDs from the many popular poets and performers available through 57 Productions.

Visitors to the SoundBlast section of the website will be able to buy the work of 30 established and emerging artists: including Benjamin Zephaniah, Lemn Sissay, John Hegley, Beyonder and Agnes Meadows. The site will offer sample audio extracts from the CDs, together with photographs and biographies of the poets, and some reviews.

A successful preview night was held at the Whitechapel Gallery on 20 March with performances from six of the featured poets. One of the audience members said, ‘It was mind blowing! The artists were all so talented in their own individual way, I have never heard spoken word poetry before but I think I'm hooked and I even want to start writing some myself!’

The Poetry Book Society hopes to extend its audiences for the Poetry Bookshop Online by reaching beyond traditional poetry readers to performance poetry attenders. Apples & Snakes are working to support performance poets in making their work more widely available. The poets will benefit from being featured on the PBO alongside a mass of other CDs and poetry books. Their work will also be heard and bought by poetry lovers, including performance poetry fans and those who don’t regularly attend live literature events. As Ventriloquist (aka Chris Redmond) said, ‘I often get approached on the internet by people who want CDs, it’s great I now have somewhere to send them.’

SoundBlast is the result of a dynamic collaboration between the Poetry Book Society and Apples & Snakes, the UK’s leading performance poetry organsation, which has sourced and reviewed some of the CDs featured in the SoundBlast section of the website.

http://www.poetrybookshoponline.com/sblast/