Dear Boy

Description

Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These warm, intelligent, characterful and funny poems gaze owlishly upon their worlds: delighting in their eccentricities, worrying at their excess and mourning their day-to-day losses in a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. Voices abound: a myriad of personas through which Emily Berry gives skilful expression to what she calls, at one point, 'other people's stories'. Here are worlds that appear at once recognisable and refracted, where doctors appear more sickly than their patients, where parents are more childlike than their children, and where scientists become hopelessly involved with their subjects and so alter their findings as they go. These are lives lived out of suitcases: half-packed, ever on the brink of departure from stage-sets of rickety homes and restless waiting rooms. And behind these frontages, beneath the multitude of stories, is the ebbing undercurrent on which the collection rides: the anguish and energy brought about by long-distance relationships that propels and terrorises and ultimately unites the work.

Emily Berry grew up in London and studied English Literature at Leeds University, and Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. In 2008 she won an Eric Gregory Award. She is a co-editor of the anthology series Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives and a contributor to The Breakfast Bible, a compendium of breakfasts to be published by Bloomsbury.

This noteworthy debut sees Emily Berry making bravura turns again and again, in poems of polished phrase, seductive technique, and, in spite of the smoke and mirrors, genuine feeling. -- Ben Wilkinson Guardian Emily Berry's debut is a treat. She is a new yet anything but hesitant voice. What is stimulating is that she approaches poetry as a flexible, permissive, dynamic ally ... Berry is seriously playful and, in her best poems, gives fantasy free rein ... [her] range is amazing. -- Kate Kellaway Observer Emily Berry's blazing debut, Dear Boy, is this month's happy reminder that poetry is where most of the most interesting writing in young Britain is happening now ... The collection is a perfectly charming, heartstring-tugging, dead smart and LOL-playful text about living and loving and writing and being young in our time. Dazed & Confused