These poems are written in the Tyneside dialect of North-Eastern England. As the author says "All of these pieces are based - some very closely - on real conversations". The speaker's include a coal miner who took part in the 1926 General Strike, the young daughter of a worker in the glass industry in the 1930s and Charlie Carr, a welder at Swan Hunter's shipyard. The poems combine dialect with modernist techniques as a way of recovering the lost speech of the region.