I’ve been meaning to write something about Emily Berry’s debut collection, Dear Boy, for a while now. Alas, time has outrun me again. In short, Emily Berry has the poise, aplomb, and good-natured intelligence that most of us wish we had on a good day. Her poetry uniquely intensifies our perception of reality and gives it a human touch that so few poets are capable of. As Jared Bland says in his review in The Globe and Mail, “You begin somehow to crave her company.” I will only say that if I had had a big sister like Ms. Berry, I am sure the long, excruciating, lost cause of my adolescence would have been much easier for me to bear.
Ms. Berry wrote this piece about her work for Michelle McGrane’s blog Peony Moon. See other reviews of Dear Boy in: B O D Y, Globe & Mail, Guardian, Literateur, LA Review of Books, Observer, and Review 31. Also, noteworthy is this sensitive review by Andrew McMillan in Eyewear.
Emily Berry is a poet, freelance writer and editor. She grew up in London and studied English Literature at Leeds University and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College. An Eric Gregory Award winner in 2008, she co-edits the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives and is a contributor to The Breakfast Bible, a compendium of breakfasts published by Bloomsbury. Her debut poetry collection is Dear Boy, published by Faber & Faber.
“Dear Boy (Faber & Faber, 2013) 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 –…
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