Stranger, Baby

Description

'The loss of a mother must be something very strange', observed Sigmund Freud, a reflection that haunts this intense and powerful new book. Emily Berry's Dear Boy was described as a 'blazing debut', winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2013. Stranger, Baby, its follow-up, is marked by the same sense of fantasy and play, estrangement and edgy humour for which she has become known. But these poems delve deeper again, in their off-kilter and often agonising encounter with childhood loss. Love, anger, tenderness, violence: all find expression in poems powered by grief's tidal undertow. This is a book of mourning, recrimination, exhilaration, and 'oceanic feeling', where familiarity meets strangeness and despair becomes a kind of celebration.

Emily Berry's first book of poems is Dear Boy, which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Hawthornden Prize. She is a contributor to The Breakfast Bible (a compendium of breakfasts) and editor of Best British Poetry 2015 (Salt Publishing). She is the editor of Poetry Review.