Running Upon the Wires Poems

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.”