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Overview
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 ingénue 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 recognizable 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 terrorizes and ultimately unites the work.
Dear Boy is an irresistible and enlivening collection by a new poet of startling and various gifts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780571284054 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Faber and Faber |
| Publication date: | 06/12/2018 |
| Series: | Faber Poetry |
| Pages: | 64 |
| Product dimensions: | 0.51(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dear Boy
Actually it’s Tuesday, and I’m taken aback.
You rang me three times and said ‘I can explain everything!’
into my voicemail. You know perfectly well I believe nothing worthwhile is explainable. Dear boy, don’t be so literal.
I’m not sure if you were there or not. Did you want to be?
We can make something up. Perhaps it was you I parasailed with above the Mediterranean? I think I remember you now; my young love!
You complained that the harness was hurting your balls.
We had such plans. We were slung between sea and sky. I tangled your legs in mine. We were a knot in the grain of the world.
Suddenly the sea was a blunt spur at our heels, remember?
Table of Contents
Our Love Could Spoil Dinner 3
Letter to Husband 4
I ♥ NY 5
The Old Fuel 6
Dear Boy 7
A Short Guide to Corseting 8
Two Budgies 10
Sweet Arlene 11
The House by the Railroad 13
The Incredible History of Patient M. 14
Everything She Does is Not Her Fault 16
The Way You Do at the End of Plays 17
The International Year of the Poem 18
My Perpendicular Daughter 20
Other People's Stories 21
Nothing Sets My Heart Aflame 22
Preparations for the Journey 24
Props 26
Shriek 27
Some Fears 30
Well bébé 31
The Tea-party Cats 32
The Value of Submission 33
Plans for a Future Romance 34
The Tomato Salad 35
Thirty-two Fouettés 36
Devil Music 38
London Love Song 39
When Will You Carry Me to the Fair? 40
Love Bird 41
Arlene's House 42
Hermann's Travelling Heart 44
Zanzibar 47
Questions I Wanted to Ask You in the Swimming Pool 48
David 49
Manners 51
Her Inheritance 52
The Numbers Game 53
The Descent 56
Bad New Government 57
What People are Saying About This
"These fast-paced poems sting the collection with electricity. They are the quick-fire reports of an ecstatic new voice in contemporary UK poetry." - LA Review of Books
"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" - Dazed and Confused
"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." - Observer
"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."- Guardian