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Divisible by Itself and One: Kae Tempest

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I always feel galvanised, inspired and in awe after seeing them totally immersed in their craft and passion. Brand New Ancients", their self-performed epic poem to a live score, won the Ted Hughes Award 2012 and the Herald Angel at Edinburgh Fringe. For now it feels like a process of reaching a sense of identification and acceptance through an undoing and a letting go.

Everyone needs to hear and feel the raw sometimes, and these collections always manage the reflection without the melancholy - more stating as a fact but without burying the pain purposefully deep or out of reach. Tempest uses words like a time traveller, taking the reader into fragments of their own lives, successes and heartbreaks. They have published plays, poems, a novel, a book-length essay, released albums and toured extensively, selling out shows from Reykjavik to Rio de Janeiro.Kae Tempest has changed their pronouns since I read their last collection, which I massively enjoyed. I read Kae Tempest 's novel The Bricks That Built the Houses a while ago and it is still up there with my favourites.

Divisible by Itself and One is the powerful new collection from our foremost truth-teller Kae Tempest. The abstractness and symbolism in many instances obscures the message and meaning of the poem despite the power of the language used by the poet. They received the Ted Hughes Award for their long-form narrative poem Brand New Ancients and the Leone D’Argento at the Venice Teatro Biennale for their work as a playwright. The long-awaited second instalment in Samantha Shannon's Sunday Times and New York Times-bestselling series Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory.

Taking its bearings - and title - from the prime number, Divisible by Itself and One is concerned, ultimately, with integrity: how to live in honest relationship with oneself and others. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Infused with all of their rich lyrical skill and unforgettable imagery, Tempest's bravura collection mines themes of transformation, identity and reaction against conformity with unparalleled insight and verve. There were moments of Tempest genius in here but this collection didn't seem to have the same urgency and direction as the likes of Hold Your Own or Let them Eat Chaos.

Their debut novel, "The Bricks That Built The Houses", sold in a highly competitive auction to Bloomsbury and was published in territories including the UK, US, France, Holland and Brazil in Spring 2015. The bestselling LGBTQ+ graphic novel about life, love, and everything that happens in between: this is the fifth volume of the Heartstopper series. It is more powerful than a surrender and it becomes celebratory but doesn't shy away from pain and anger and the rawness of the unshaping process. As with most poetry collection, there were some poems I liked better than others and I do think I like some of Tempest's other works better, but this was still very good and very powerful! For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation.

Questions of integrity – hence the prime number of the title – are addressed in direct, affecting terms: how can we be true to ourselves while under constant pressure to conform? Ruminative, wise, with a newer, more contemplative and metaphysical note running through, it is a book engaged with the big questions and the emotional states in which we live and create. I seen them perform some of these poems in person this week and if you have the chance to do the same I can’t recommend enough. Their books have been translated into eleven languages and published to critical acclaim around the world.

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