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Running Upon the Wires
Running Upon the Wires: Poems | Kate Tempest
2 posts | 5 read | 2 to read
From award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, rapper, and recording artist Kate Tempest, an unabashedly intimate poetry collection that confirms her as one of our most important poetic truth-tellers. My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. (James Joyce, Dubliners) Award-winning writer, spoken-word star, and spellbinding performer Kate Tempest's raw and exhilarating new collection is a heart-breaking, moving, and joyous book about the experience of love in its endings and beginnings. In a sense a departure from her previous work, Running Upon the Wires charts the dissolution of one relationship, the budding of another, and what happens in between, when the heart is pulled both ways at once. It's about joy and despair, confusion and clarity, self-destruction and revival. And it will come as no surprise to readers that Tempest is as direct, distinctive, and unflinching an observer of matters of the heart as she is of social and political change. Calling in its title upon the classical poet's harp, the technological wires of communication, and the neural wires of feeling, Tempest's electrifying new verse weaves interpersonal struggle into a powerfully cathartic and memorable work of art. Explosively lyrical, rhythmic, and throbbing with feeling, this collection is frayed yet powerful in its pain, determined to speak and to find love in a human community of “terrifying beauty.”
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Bookwomble
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Mehso-so

I've loved each of Kate Tempest's previous books of poetry, so I had high expectations for this, her newest collection. Unfortunately, I found myself rather disappointed by her efforts this time ("efforts" sounds dismissive as I look at the word I've written, though I'm not inclined to change it).

Kate's subject matter this time is herself, the ending and aftermath of one relationship and the start of a new one from the ashes of the old. ??

Bookwomble There are some nice turns of phrase, but too few. There are some poems that seem half-thought fragments of ideas scribbled on scraps of paper, discarded, then swept back together. It all seems a little self-indulgent, although it improves slightly towards the end. I get a feeling of Kate having mined her emotions for material, rather than having expressed her emotions through the poems. (Yet she still speaks to me as "Kate" rather than "Tempest"). 6y
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Bookwomble
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Today's book parcel 😊 A new Kate Tempest book of poetry I'm looking forward to, plus three others I allowed myself 📚