Dear Boy

Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These smart 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 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 gifts.

Emily Berry 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 co-writer of The Breakfast Bible, a compendium of breakfasts. She works as a freelance writer and editor.