Hold Your Own

This book is a collection of poetry by Kae Tempest, of whose other stuff I've read I'm a big fan. Based on the ancient Greek story of Tiresias, the poems here are bound together in a sequence that follows through childhood, manhood, womanhood, and 'blind profit' - each layering continually circling, reflecting, with a deftness of social commentary and a relatableness that quite belies the ostensibly lofty or complex bundle which are hallmarks of why Tempest is one of the world's most famous working poetic artists. Feelings will fly in all directions and thought-provocation oozes from every page, as the fine [im]balances between subtlety and poignancy wrestle each other across the themes and narratives in recognizable conflicting archetypes that shout with a voice that is as fresh as grime yet resonates like myth. High among my favourite poetry books that I've read recently.

the bricks that built the houses

This book, the debut novel from Kae Tempest (you know, that poet who wrote this), was - well, I'd like to say the best novel I've read in ages, but truthfully I've read loads of incredible novels this year, but seriously, this one is a stand-out fresh one. I acquired it at a hippy-run bookstall at Glastonbury and basically read most of it in two big sittings over a family holiday in a hippy-run cottage in the Forest of Bowland in North Yorkshire - sat with a brew and the dog and a thousand midges on an impossibly comfy armchair on a wooden porch overlooking a small lawn which past a rickety fence is a sheer drop through dense brackeny foresty areas down to a river which I could hear all the while; yes, it was a very nice holiday, even though I had to do loads of dissertation reading during it (and also leave halfway through for a job interview), and this book comprised my recreational reading for it. You don't need to care about my holiday, I'm just adding a little texture as this post will be in the middle of all the super-brief academic backlog ones.
   Anyway - it's a novel about young Londoners: gregarious dancer Becky and her jealous boyfriend Pete and his coke-dealing sister Harry and her partner-in-crime Leon; it's about the adults peopling the families and communities constraining and defining who they have and can become, the deep-running fragility of human need for connection; all characters whose roles have emotional impacts on the main four are explored in bleak and beautiful portrait with astonishing depth and clarity; Kae Tempest has a knack for conveying huge and tiny shades of feeling with a linguistic deftness that will make you laugh and cry and catch your breath in your gullet and sit back slowly with your hand rubbing the back of your neck as you softly murmur 'fuck', and the London that they paints is alive, is dismally brutally gloriously random and messy and gentrified and alienating and home and you get a tangible sense of place and community (or lack of) for the characters throughout: honestly, the plot may be pretty straightforward but it is pulled off with a dazzling, cinematic, heartbreaking and life-affirming prose, and a cast whom you'll know like real acquaintances by the time you finish - all of which add up to make this a bingeable (one up from readable) and supremely rewarding novel.
   Read this if you like Very Good fiction.

Let Them Eat Chaos

This book by Kae Tempest is comprised of a single 71-page poem, also released as an album of spoken-word-with-music,* by the same title.

   It is utterly brilliant.

   They takes us on a journey through the nexus of what it means to be an interpersonally-connected and socially-aware human amid the complexities, injustices, small joys and small hardships, big hopes and big losses, distractions, and whatnot, of the 21st-century world. There is a lot of incisive (punchy not preachy) political commentary and calling out of individualistic apathy. The bulk of the poem is a portrait of a street, in London, at 4.18am, in which place at which time exactly seven people, strangers to each other, are awake, for different reasons. Each of these seven, after a two-or-three page descriptive introduction, is treated to four-to-six pages of verse voicing their internal struggles. These vary massively in tone - from despairing at the gentrification of one's lifelong neighbourhood forcing one soon to move to bafflement at one's own incapacity to not fall into the same holes in a low-pay high-sesh lifestyle - but the thread connecting them (other than all being awake at 4.18am on this London street) is these individuals' disconnection from others. The poem climaxes with a surprise thunderstorm striking, and all seven rush into the street in wonder and excitement, see each other, and laugh, dance, hug, in the torrential rain. Kae ends the poem with an uproarious cry of pleas to the reader, to all humans, to wake up and love more - to value the stories and struggles of others, even those we don't know, to fight for justice against the powers that neglect it - because what is striving for justice if not effectively loving people who may be affected by injustice? Its language and imagery and juxtapositions reveal a great many of the intricate deceptions of politicised global consumer capitalism, culture under neoliberalism, and our socioeconomic relationship with our planet. Its portraits paint familiar pictures of kinds of people who live and struggle in London, as in the UK, as in most places, in this day and age - a world where community is being made redundant - and remind us that empathy is the key. The world is a complicatedly broken and brokenly complicated place, and any effort to make it less so requires that we, ourselves, first start genuinely respecting the lives, needs, narratives, struggles, contradictions, and basic human legitimacy, of others around us. Before the flood comes.

   This is a poem that, in anguish and rage and indefatigable faith in human goodness, tells us we can do better and we know it so we fucking should do better. It avoids being bleak and cynical, facing real problems through recognisable characters, and (also in the non-character-bits) walks the line such that the darkness is never being held too far from our knowledge of the possibility of light. It is an immensely challenging and ultimately heartening poem - a radical fireburst call-to-arms.** And it is fantastically fun on the ears.

   Yeh. Read this poem.***

* Worth listening to - the poem, heard in their voice and accompanied by the music, takes its fullest power. I can attest to this having seen them live in what was probably the largest and sweatiest venue hosting a spoken word performance in Birmingham that night. (Spoken word performances tend not to be in large sweaty venues.)

** Okay, not arms, the opposite of arms, love, but call-to-arms is the phrase. Just don't get the idea that this is supposed to kickstart some violent revolution, it's about genuine human connection being the root of both community and meaningful social justice. Perhaps a nonviolent revolution then? God knows we need one atm. Peace and love, dude.

*** In one sitting, out loud, if possible.