Description

I want to sing you early songs. Go deeper.
I want to take you back where you began,
Find the scraps of you you hid in secret
And bring them back to life beneath my tongue.

Divisible by Itself and One is the powerful new collection from our foremost truth-teller Kae Tempest. 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. Some of the poems experiment with form, some are free, and yet all are politically and morally conscious. Divisible by Itself and One is also a book about human form, the body as boundary and how we are read by the world. 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.

“Tempest delivers their thoughts gorgeously, rhythmically, but also with clarity and a fierce grace” Observer

Publisher Review

A winning wielder of words * Observer * Tempest has forged their own voice, unlike anything else in the mainstream poetry world * Independent on Sunday * One of the brightest British talents around * Guardian * [Tempest] has made history, transcending the line between poetry and music * The Telegraph * 'Like the great Philip Larkin, 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 chiselled lines . . . shuttles easily back and forth between the mundane and the mythic, the banal and philosophical' * The New York Times * Dazzling wordsmithery. . . As anyone who has seen them perform will know, they don't just paint pictures with words when they perform, they paint fireworks in the night sky * Metro *