Dear Boy

Dear Boy is the dramatic and inventive debut by Emily Berry. These warm, intelligent, characterful and funny poems gaze owlishly upon their worlds: delighting in their eccentricities, worrying at their excess and mourning their day-to-day losses in a series of deft and seductive soliloquies. Voices abound: a myriad of personas through which Emily Berry gives skilful expression to what she calls, at one point, 'other people's stories'. Here are worlds that appear at once recognisable and refracted, where doctors appear more sickly than their patients, where parents are more childlike than their children, and where scientists become hopelessly involved with their subjects and so alter their findings as they go. These are lives lived out of suitcases: half-packed, ever on the brink of departure from stage-sets of rickety homes and restless waiting rooms. And behind these frontages, beneath the multitude of stories, is the ebbing undercurrent on which the collection rides: the anguish and energy brought about by long-distance relationships that propels and terrorises and ultimately unites the work.