Hold Your Own

Description

Hold Your Own, Kae Tempest's first full-length collection for Picador is an ambitious, multi-voiced work based around the mythical figure of Tiresias. This four-part work follows him through his transformations from child, man and woman to blind prophet; through this structure, Tempest holds up a mirror to contemporary life in a direct and provocative way rarely associated with poetry. A vastly popular and accomplished performance poet, Tempest commands a huge and dedicated following on the performance and rap circuit. Brand New Ancients, also available from Picador, won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and has played to packed concert halls on both sides of the Atlantic.

Kae Tempest was born in London in 1985. Their work includes the plays Wasted, Glasshouse and Hopelessly Devoted; the poetry collections Everything Speaks in its Own Way and Hold Your Own; the albums Everybody Down, Balance and Let Them Eat Chaos; the long poems Brand New Ancients and Let Them Eat Chaos; and their debut novel, The Bricks that Built the Houses. They were nominated for the Mercury Music Prize for their debut album, Everybody Down, and received the Ted Hughes Award and a Herald Angel Award for Brand New Ancients. Kae was also named a Next Generation poet in 2014.

Poet, performer, novelist: the rise of the uncategorisable Kate Tempest -- Laura Barton * Guardian * Tempest's voice looks to be one we will be hearing for some while to come -- Laura Barton * Guardian * Dazzling wordsmithery. . . As anyone who has seen her perform will know, she doesn't just paint pictures with words when she performs, she paints fireworks in the night sky -- Claire Allfree * Metro * A winning wielder of words. . . The common thread through Tempest's diverse work is her love of words. In mesmerising rhyme and galloping rhythm, her passion for the classics collides with urban street slang, social observation, consumerism and the concerns of contemporary youth -- Michael Hogan * Observer * The picture emerges of a diverse, fluid writer and performer who is spreading her wings anew -- Charles Hutchinson * Press (York) * Hold Your Own is a collection of discrete, sometimes startlingly intimate moments by turns tender, funny, and angry. . . among the warmest moments in the collection are those that celebrate this particular, catalytic thrill - of the instant when words are not just lived, but delivered -- Lauren Strain * Skinny * Hold Your Own is intellectually as well as emotionally exhilarating, yet unafraid to challenge the purveyors of wilful obscurity . . . With her poems about change and growth and passion, this girl is going places - and I'll be glad to go with * Daily Mail * Her reworking of the Tiresias myth has all of the form's virtues . . . a powerful immediacy * Belfast Telegraph * Her opening poem here is the longest, an updating of the story of Tiresias, and is both politically and emotionally stark, while the rest explore the human passion with a refreshing toughness * Sunday Herald * Tempest collection feels like a game-changer. Tempest has forged her own voice, unlike anything else in the mainstream poetry world * Independent on Sunday * Tempest follows her Ted Hughes Prize-winning Brand New Ancients with a bold retelling of the myth of Tiresias. In a voice at once inviting and challenging, erudite and incongruous, the 28-year-old south Londoner confirms her position as one of literature's most remarkable millennials -- Books of the Year 2014 * Financial Times * Hold Your Own sees her stepping into the world of traditional "slim volume verse," publishing a book of poems to be read as well as heard. And she steps in with style . . . The contrast between the wasteground filled with shopping trolleys and used condoms and the miraculous transformation is dramatic and comic and moving . . . Either in person or on the page, she shows she's got sharp, important things to say and the poetic skills to say them -- Solomon Hughes * Morning Star * Like the great Philip Larkin, Ms. Tempest has an ability to write about big, metaphysical subjects in the most vernacular language, while conjuring a sense of contemporary English life with a handful of chiseled lines . . .She demonstrates a knack - in both "Brand New Ancients" and "Hold Your Own" - for being able to shuttle easily back and forth between the mundane and the mythic, the banal and philosophical, and for using her pictorial imagination to sear specific images into the reader's mind -- Michiko Kakutani * New York Times *