Running Upon the Wires: Poems
Description
From award-winning writer, spoken-word star, and spellbinding performer Kae Tempest, an unabashedly intimate poetry collection that confirms them as one of our most important poetic truth tellers.
“Running Upon the Wires is full body art, smack against love in all its stages, a battle to the finish—or the beginning—the epic struggle (and ecstasy) as only Kae Tempest could record.” —Bob Holman
My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires (James Joyce, Dubliners).
Kae Tempest is as bold an observer of the human heart as they are of social and political change. Their raw and exhilarating new collection of poems throbs with love’s extremes: the end of one relationship, the budding of another, and what happens when the heart is pulled both ways at once.
Tempest's "wires" are the classical poet’s harp, the technological wires of communication, and the neural wires of feeling. Their electrifying new verse weaves interpersonal struggle into a cathartic and memorable work of art about joy and despair, confusion and clarity, self-destruction and revival. Explosively lyrical and pulsing with feeling, Running Upon the Wires is frayed yet powerful in its pain, determined to speak and find love in a human community of “terrifying beauty.”
Praise for Running Upon the Wires: Poems
“One of the brightest British talents around. [Their] spoken-word performances have the metre and craft of traditional poetry, the kinetic agitation of hip-hop and the intimacy of a whispered heart-to-heart . . . drawing on ancient mythology and sermonic cadence to tell stories of the everyday.” - The Guardian
“Tempest, who wrestles the Classics to the Present and spits the World in a single Word, takes on the anatomy of love as told from ending to beginning in the devastating Running Upon the Wires. Journal jottings, prose poems, imagistic bursts, sonnet-like sequences, haiku, sentences that run on, run off, run over . . . This is full body art, smack against love in all its stages, a battle to the finish--or the beginning-- the epic struggle (and ecstasy) as only Kae Tempest could record.” - Bob Holman
Praise for - The Bricks that Built the Houses
“Deeply affecting: cinematic in scope; touching in its emphatic humanity . . . Tempest's voice--by turns raging and tender--never falters. By the time the novel reaches its cleareyed climax, cleverly undercutting its own promised happy ending, the reader is left with the impression of a work that hums with human life.” - New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
“Tempest has a knack for the devastating throwaway line--a skill-honed, no doubt, from years of rapping and spoken-word performances. [Their] work is rich with underlinable lines . . . Captivating.” - New Yorker
“Blake, Shakespeare, Eliot, the Wu-Tang Clan: when an artist's outlook on boundaries is so dizzyingly open, you long to know what happens next.” - The Guardian
Praise for - Brand New Ancients
“Tempest has an ability to write about big, metaphysical subjects in the most vernacular language.” - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Thrillingly good . . . Tempest stitches together words with such animate grace that language acquires an almost tactile quality, and the drama [they] unfold . . . soars to operatic dimensions.” - Charles Isherwood, New York Times
“Breathe[s] new life into old classic forms; a long poem about us and the gods that's all high-kicking verve and long-range understanding. I loved its vision, powerful and merciful.” - Ali Smith, The Observer
