"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 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.

Dear Boy (Faber Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Berry, Emily

Poetry

Faber&Faber

"The loss of a mother must be something very strange", observed Sigmund Freud, a reflection that haunts this intense and powerful new book. Stranger, Baby is Emily Berry's second collection of poetry. These poems are filled with fantasy and play, estrangement, and edgy humor. Love, anger, tenderness and violence all find expression in poems powered by grief's tidal undertow. This is a book of mourning, recrimination, exhilaration, and "oceanic feeling", where familiarity meets strangeness and despair becomes a kind of celebration.

Stranger, Baby (Faber Poetry)

History & Criticism

Unexhausted Time inhabits a world of dream and dawn, in which thoughts touch us ‘like soft rain’, and all the elements are brought closer in.\nFeelings, messages, symbols, visions . . . Emily Berry’s latest collection takes shape in the half-light between the real and the imagined, where everything is lost and yet ‘nothing goes away’. Here life’s innumerable impressions, moods, seasons and déjà vus collect and disarrange themselves, while a glowing, companionable ‘I’ travels the mind’s landscapes in hope of refuge and transformation amid these displaced moments in time. Whether one reads Unexhausted Time as a long poem to step into or a series of titled and untitled fragments to pick up and cherish, the work is healing and inspiring, always asking how we might harness the power of naming without losing life’s ‘magic unknownness’. By offering these intangible encounters, Emily Berry more truly presents ‘what being alive is’.\n‘Emily Berry has a refreshingly free, not to say incendiary, approach to poetry.’ Observer

Unexhausted Time

The White Review No. 29 features interviews with poet Fanny Howe, novelist and memoirist Scholastique Mukasonga and artist Ingrid Pollard, who also provides the issue's cover. We present new fiction by Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Real Life Brandon Taylor, Ilya Leutin (tr. Anna Aslanyan) and Elizabeth O'Connor, whose story 'Woman With a White Pekingese' is the winner of the White Review Short Story Prize 2020. Emily Berry's essay 'The Secret Country of Her Mind' is a polyvocal account of agoraphobia in dialogue with photographer Jacqui Kenny; Caleb Azumah Nelson's 'On Solace' explores languages of mourning and expressions of community, while Victoria Adukwei Bulley's 'On Water' traverses global colonial history, seeking new forms of kinship as she investigates her own lineage. Poetry series are contributed by Laura Elliott, Jennifer Lee Tsai and Jack Underwood, while series of artworks are presented from Adam Pendleton and Hervé Guibert.

The White Review No.29 (White Review, 29)

O'Connor, Elizabeth

Taylor, Brandon

Underwood, Jack

ELLIOTT, LAURA

Azumah Nelson, Caleb

Adukwei Bulley, Victoria

Leutin, Ilya

Lee Tsai, Jennifer

Arts & Photography

Fitzcarraldo Editions

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