Brand New Ancients

December 1, 2015

Award-winning poet and spoken-word performer Tempest's latest offering imagines that people today are deities, just as the gods of classical times were based on human beings: "We're the same beings that began, still living/in all of our fury and foulness and friction./everyday odysseys, dreams and decisions.../The stories are there if you listen." Mary has an affair with Brian and gives birth to his son while married to Kevin, a happy new father. The boy, Clive, grows up to be a tough street kid whose only friend, Terry, is a lonely boy who is seriously burnt in a fire set by Clive. They become menacing toughs who finally attack a strong young woman as she is closing a pub. "If you see them, hoods up,/prowling the pavement at night/you'll walk quickly away,/skin prickling with terror/but they know love though,/and they know laughter,/know each other as brother,/friend, father." The lives of adults and teens living sad, unfulfilled existences are depicted in the spare words that capture a lack of hope. Only one young man, who likes to draw, succeeds in finding a way to make his creativity a career. If this were a novel, readers would want more details and plot development. However, this story is convincing as verse. VERDICT Teens will come away wishing they could witness this story poem performed by the creator and will want to rap it themselves.-Karlan Sick, Library Consultant, New York City

Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2015
Two books by English performance poet Tempest arrive in the States, and if Walt Whitman had rapped, he would have sounded like her. This Ted Hughes Awardwinning poem spans nearly 50 pages and several generations, darting from long, introspective sentences ( Our legends. / That face on the street you walk past without looking at, / or that face on the street that walks past you without looking back ) to quick bursts of sound ( they are trying to tell the truth / but the truth is hard to say / the gods are born, they live a while / and then they pass away ). Tempest begins by panning the whole of humanity Brand New Ancients, she calls us, each a godbefore zooming in on a husband who fathers two sons, one illegitimate. With different upbringings, they go on to become very different men, and Tempest follows their lives, interspersing the narrative with rhythmic observations on the human state. A note tells us that this poem should be read aloud, and it is indeed an oral history, an exploration of sound as much as it is a story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)