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.
I should start by saying that Numbered Boxes by Pete 'the Temp' Bearder is so good that I read it in its entirety over the course of one evening.
When initially reading this I was hit with a complete sense of nostalgia. The way Pete spoke and the topics he talked about ignited memories from my childhood and my school life.
I love Pete Bearder’s work, and this is no exception!! My favourites are Gnome, Curwen’s Mega Poem (made me cry so cute 😭) and ‘Glastonbury’ by William Blake