Hold Your Own

Critics Review

• Poet, performer, novelist: the rise of the uncategorisable Kate Tempest

  Guardian

• Tempest’s voice looks to be one we will be hearing for some while to come

  Guardian

• 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

  Metro

• 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

  Observer

• The picture emerges of a diverse, fluid writer and performer who is spreading her wings anew

  Press (York)

• 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

  Skinny

• 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

  Daily Mail

• Her reworking of the Tiresias myth has all of the form’s virtues . . . a powerful immediacy

  Belfast Telegraph

• 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

  Sunday Herald

• Tempest collection feels like a game-changer. Tempest has forged her own voice, unlike anything else in the mainstream poetry world

  Independent on Sunday

• 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

  Financial Times

• 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

  Morning Star

• Like the great Philip Larkin, Ms. Tempest has an ability to write about big, metaphysical subjects in the most vernacular language, while conjuring a sense of contemporary English life with a handful of chiseled lines . . .She demonstrates a knack – in both “Brand New Ancients” and “Hold Your Own” – for being able to shuttle easily back and forth between the mundane and the mythic, the banal and philosophical, and for using her pictorial imagination to sear specific images into the reader’s mind

  New York Times