podcast listen to the organist the culturally omnivorous intellectually ravenous podcast from the editors of the believer

magazine part of poetry is learning how to speak chili billy chili billy i'm also a horse i really value my life

even though i know it's debatable whether I'm even really alive.

The right reading for this is the one I'm giving it.

Find the organist on KCRW.com or wherever you download podcasts.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots! Well would we be without booms?

Where would we be without good?

No to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Kate Tempest.

I've just discovered her work, and it's very exciting to me.

I began by listening to a rap CD called Everybody

Down. As it happens, that's a unique record because it's full length about a group of people.

It tells a whole story.

There were plays before it, am I right?

One in particular called Wasted

that talks about the condition of being without hope with only the pub and booze and drugs

to keep you going. The CD particularizes some of these hopeless people, and then came a kind of miracle,

a book of poems called Brand New Ancients in which hope is found that if people can re-root their hopelessness

...