Running Upon The Wires

Running Upon The Wires is Kate Tempest's first book of free-standing poetry since the acclaimed Hold Your Own. In a beautifully varied series of formal poems, spoken songs, fragments, vignettes and ballads, Tempest charts the heartbreak at the end of one relationship and the joy at the beginning of a new love; but she also tells us what happens in between, when the heart is pulled both ways at once. Running Upon The Wires is a departure from Tempest's previous work, and unashamedly personal and intimate in its address - but will also confirm Tempest's role as one of our most important poetic truth-tellers: it will be no surprise to readers to discover that she is no less a direct and unflinching observer of matters of the heart than she is of social and political change.

Running Upon The Wires is a heartbreaking, moving and joyous book about love, in its endings and in its beginnings. 'Whether on stage or on the page, her language hits like lightning. It illuminates and it burns.'