With this dazzling modern myth in verse, Kae Tempest became the youngest winner of the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Yes, the gods are on the park bench, the gods are on the bus, / The gods are all here, the gods are in us. / The gods are timeless, fearless, fighting to be bold, / conviction is a heavy hand to hold, / grip it, winged sandals tearing up the pavement -- / you, me, everyone: Brand New Ancients. Kae Tempest's words in Brand New Ancients are written to be read aloud; the book combines poem, rap, and humanist sermon, by turns tender and fierce. Set in Southeast London, Brand New Ancients finds the mythic in the mundane. It is the story of two half-brothers, Thomas and Clive, unknown to each other -- Thomas the result of an affair between his mother and Clive's father. Tempest, with wide-ranging empathy, takes us inside the passionless marriage of Jane and Kevin -- the man who suspects Thomas is not his son, but loves him just the same -- and the neighboring home of Mary and Brian, where betrayal has not been so placidly accepted. The sons of these two households -- quiet, creative Thomas and angry, destructive Clive -- will cross paths in adolescence, their fates converging with mortal fury. These characters' loves, their infidelities, their disappointments and their small comforts -- these, Tempest argues, are timeless. Our lives and our choices are no less important than those of history and myth. Awarded the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, Brand New Ancients insists on our importance as individuals -- and asserts Kae Tempest's importance as a talent impossible to ignore. 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 “Thrillingly good . . . Tempest stitches together words with such animate grace that language acquires an almost tactile quality, and the drama [they] unfold . . . soars to operatic dimensions. . . . [An] hypnotically persuasive vision.” ― Charles Isherwood, New York Times on BNA “Breathe[s] new life into old classic forms; a long poem about us and the gods that's all high-kicking verve and long-range understanding. I loved its vision, powerful and merciful.” ― Ali Smith, The Observer , Best Books of the Year, on BNA “Feels as if we are . . . gathered around a hearth, hearing the age-old stories that help us make sense of our lives. . . The ordinary is lifted into the extraordinary.” ― The Guardian on BNA “A torrent of poetry so brilliant that the words often seem to glow and smoke with intensity . . . [Tempest] writes with brilliance, but above all with overwhelming love.” ― The Scotsman on BNA “The most exciting contribution to poetry this year . . . Tempest has created an ambitious, unforgettable mythology and made us look at the world afresh.” ― Judges' citation for Ted Hughes Award for BNA Kae Tempest is a poet. He is also a writer, a lyricist, a performer and a recording artist. He has published plays, poems, a novel, a book length non-fiction essay, released albums and toured extensively, selling out shows from Reykjavik to Rio de Janeiro. He received Mercury Music Prize nominations for both of the albums Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos and two Ivor Novello nominations for his song-writing on The Book of Traps and Lessons. He was named a Next Generation Poet in 2014, a once in a decade accolade. He received the Ted Hughes Award for his longform narrative poem Brand New Ancients and the Leone D'Argento at the Venice Teatro Biennale for his work as a playwright. His books have been translated into eleven languages and published to critical acclaim around the wo