
Dear Boy
Emily Berry(Author)
Faber & Faber (Publisher)
Published on 7. March 2013
Book
Paperback/Softback
64 pages
978-0-571-28405-4 (ISBN)
Description
Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful, intelligent and darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds, through a series of deft and seductive soliloquies.
In a collection with a taste for ventriloquy and wickedness, and a flair for vocal cross-dressing, the balance of power is always shifting in an unexpected direction - an ingenue masquerades as a femme fatale, a doctor appears more disturbed than his patient, and parents seem more unruly than their children. Eccentric, intimate, arch, anxious, decadent and sometimes mournful, the book's confiding, conversational voices tell stories recognisable and refracted, carried along by the undercurrent on which the collection ebbs and rides: the anguish and energy brought about by a long-distance love affair, which propels and terrorises and ultimately unites the work.
Dear Boy is an irresistible and enlivening collection by a new poet of startling and various gifts.
In a collection with a taste for ventriloquy and wickedness, and a flair for vocal cross-dressing, the balance of power is always shifting in an unexpected direction - an ingenue masquerades as a femme fatale, a doctor appears more disturbed than his patient, and parents seem more unruly than their children. Eccentric, intimate, arch, anxious, decadent and sometimes mournful, the book's confiding, conversational voices tell stories recognisable and refracted, carried along by the undercurrent on which the collection ebbs and rides: the anguish and energy brought about by a long-distance love affair, which propels and terrorises and ultimately unites the work.
Dear Boy is an irresistible and enlivening collection by a new poet of startling and various gifts.
Reviews / Votes
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 & ConfusedMore details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 126 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
89 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-571-28405-4 (9780571284054)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
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. She works as a freelance writer and editor.