Dear Boy, Paperback/Emily Berry

"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 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 ing nue 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. About the Author: 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.