Let Them Eat Chaos

Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2016   Follow that light with your tired eyes.                It’s been a long day, I know, but look –                                                             watch as it flickers                                              then roars into fullness                                              Fills the whole frame.                             Blazing a fire you can’t bear the majesty of An extraordinary new epic in verse from a masterful pioneer of performance poetry. Let Them Eat Chaos, Kae Tempest's new long poem, written for live performance and heard on the album release of the same name, is both a powerful sermon and a moving play for voices. Seven neighbours inhabit the same London street, but are all unknown to each other. The clock freezes in the small hours, and, one by one, we see directly into their lives: lives that are damaged, disenfranchised, lonely, broken, addicted, and all, apparently, without hope. Then a great storm breaks over London, and brings them out into the night to face each other - and their last chance to connect. Tempest argues that our alienation from one another has bred a terrible indifference to our own fate, but she counters this with a plea to challenge the forces of greed which have conspired to divide us, and mend the broken home of our own planet while we still have time. Let Them Eat Chaos is a cri de coeur and a call to action. It is undoubtedly, both on the page and in Tempest's electric performance, one of the most powerful poetic and contemporarily relevant statements of the year. Kae Tempest burst onto the scene as a spoken-word-artist, poet, rapper and playwright having been performing at open-mic nights since the age of 16. They received unprecedented acclaim from all quarters for their inventive long-form poem Brand New Ancients for which they were awarded the Ted Hughes Award.