Numbered Boxes by Pete (the Temp) Bearder

Numbered Boxes is a journey through the stanzas of school days, family, work addiction, heartbreak and back into school as a teacher. Much of the book was written while Pete was teaching full-time in an East London secondary school as part of a world-first pilot project, the Spoken Word Education Programme. The book opens the lid on containers built by institutions, and those harder to unpack, the ones built by ourselves. The final section of the book breaks free from the shadows of these confines and escapes into the debauchery of mid-summer, drawing on a body of work written while Pete was Glastonbury poet in residence in 2015. Numbered boxes channels the energy and wit of his stage performance, into a body of lyric, narrative and comically surreal poetry, crafted to deliver on the page.

Pete the Temp is a poet, educator and musician. His work has been featured on BBC radio and TV and in 2009 he became the National Poetry Slam Champion. Pete has toured theatres across England with his one man show Pete (the Temp) vs Climate Change. In 2015 he completed the MA Writer / Teacher Programme at Goldsmiths University. This led him to become one of the world’s first full-time spoken word educators to be embedded in a secondary school. He later went on to pilot the same work in a primary school. He was subsequently invited to deliver a TED Talk on the subject Why Every School Should Have a Spoken Word Educator. Pete has toured all over Europe with his art and now works as a poet and street performer.