Hold Your Own

In Britain, Tempest is a front-page phenomenon: the rapper, performance poet, and playwright has picked up attention and honors such as a Mercury Award nomination and a commission from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her debut poetry collection reveals an earnest writer of strong declarations, clear anecdotes, and inspiring slogans, but also some clichés. Much of the book revolves around a modern Tiresias, a mythic figure who grows up a boy, becomes a woman, and then becomes a man, experiencing and commenting on our highly gendered lives along the way: “Because the boy will grow up/ makes him no less innocent.” In a love poem, she writes, “I feel you feeling me move... I lay in the dark and listened to the rain./ Drank the night in breathless mouthfuls.” Tiresias, in the opening poem, decides that “True love takes its toll/ On souls/ Who are not used to feeling whole.” Tempest often writes about, and for, teenagers; she could get a lot of attention here through her appeal to young readers, or through the power of her live delivery. Though some British performers translate beautifully and almost completely to the printed page, the evidence here is that Tempest may not be one of them. [em](Mar.) [/em]