Let Them Eat Chaos

Kate Tempest's powerful new narrative poem--set to music on her album of the same title, shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize--illuminates the lives of a single city street, creating an electric, humming human symphony

Let Them Eat Chaos, Kate 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 neighbors 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 own 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, and, both on the page and in Tempest's electric performance, one of the most powerful poetic statements of the year.

Kate Tempest grew up in southeast London, where she still lives. She has gained acclaim as a poet, playwright, rapper, and recording artist. Let Them Eat Chaos and Everybody Down were both shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. Her books of poetry include Brand New Ancients, a long poem conceived as a performance piece, which won the Ted Hughes Award for Poetry in 2012, and the collection Hold Your Own, andshe was selected as one of this decade’s Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in 2014. She is also the author of a novel, The Bricks that Built the Houses.