Running Upon the Wires: Poems

“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 Kate Tempest could record.” -Bob Holman

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 is as bold an observer of the human heart as she is of social and political change. Her 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.

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 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.”