Linda Chase

Linda Chase is an associate lecturer at MMU on the MA couse in Creative Writing. She also teaches at the Poetry School, Manchester, of which she is the coordinator.

She runs a reading series, Poets and Players which features new writers along with established poets and musicians. Linda's collections include Young Men Dancing, These Goodbyes, The Wedding Spy (Carcanet), and Extended Family (Carcanet). She also has a short story in Manchester Stories 5.

Listen to Lindda read her short story 'Fifty / Fifty'.

Website : www.lindachase.co.uk

Titles by Linda Chase

Extended Family

Extended Family is a sensual celebration of the varied relationships that make up lives richly lived: from the subtle, intimate interactions of close family members and lovers, to the mutual rewards and stresses of relationships with friends, therapists, students and housemates.

The book begins in America, with childhood memories and adolescent love. In the second section, 'Younger Men Have Birthdays Too', a love affair unravels in a sequence of tender, angry love poems. In the final section, relationships encompass casual interactions and the close understandings of friends, loving kindness and the chaos of mental breakdown. Linda Chase's wit and sharp eye for telling detail make this a collection in which, with a wry eye, the poet can express heartbreak, and the narratives of the everyday reveal unique moments of insight.

'Linda Chase has a mature voice, encompassing the weight of experience as well as intensity of feeling...She has a laid-back, conversational style, which can contain a complex and much darker reality...I like Chase's poems for their honesty, their warmth and their wry sense of humour.' - Ambit magazine, 2002.