Running Upon the Wires

From award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, rapper, and recording artist Kate Tempest, a poetry collection that entwines the intimate with the global, lost love with political breakdown.

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 is at the forefront of a contemporary renaissance in poetry, part of a new generation of accessible, political, and movingly candid pop poets rejuvenating the form and driving sales. In her electrifying new collection, Tempest narrates the dissolution of her marriage in poems that draw us into the ache of lost love, then whirl us out into a wider world, where xenophobia and growing economic disparity are the symptoms of a society splintered by inequality and fractured by hate.

Tempest's tentative title, Running Upon the Wires, is a nod to the classical poet's harp, the technological wires of communication, and the neural wires of feeling; it draws on Tempest's famed, distinctive ability to weave together interpersonal struggle and urgent political crisis into a powerfully cathartic and memorable work of art. Explosively lyrical, rhythmic, and urgently timely, this is a raw and throbbing collection of verse, frayed yet powerful in its pain, determined to speak and to find love in a human community of "terrifying beauty."