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Hold Your Own

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Hold Your Own

By: Kae Tempest
Narrated by: Kae Tempest
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About this listen

Hold Your Own, Kate 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.

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Critic reviews

Poet, performer, novelist: the rise of the uncategorisable Kate Tempest (Laura Barton)
Tempest's voice looks to be one we will be hearing for some while to come (Laura Barton)
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)
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)
The picture emerges of a diverse, fluid writer and performer who is spreading her wings anew (Charles Hutchinson)
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)
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
Her reworking of the Tiresias myth has all of the form's virtues . . . a powerful immediacy
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
Tempest collection feels like a game-changer. Tempest has forged her own voice, unlike anything else in the mainstream poetry world
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)
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)
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brilliant book, I've read it twice before, but hearing Kae read it to me was amazing.

fantastic read.

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This is the most beautiful and damning poetry of our times. Tempest is the modern Shakespeare. Simple.

Poetry for revolution

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Hold Your Own was awesome to listen to, almost as amazing as her collection Brand New Ancients.

I loved how the poems in this collection blend myth and legend with contemporary issues and ideas. This makes for some entertaining and highly original poetry. Tempest does something similar with Brand New Ancients and she’s good at it.

Reading the poems is hugely enjoyable but Tempest’s work is designed to be listened to. I cannot stress this enough. Listen to Hold Your Own and be transported somewhere incredible. I love Tempest’s voice. I would kill to see her perform live.

A riveting collection of poems

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Kate Tempest's verse is clever, lyrical and a sharp as a razor blade. For people who think poetry is prissy and irrelevant - take this!

Raw and sublimely lyrical

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This is an incredible piece of writing. The power and bliss of these words is only enhanced by Tempests reading of them.
clever, witty, honest and profound.

Profound. Honest. Kind. Funny.

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