Stranger, Baby
As seen:
By Emily Berry
avg rating
1 review
The powerful new collection from award-winning poet, Emily Berry.
Emily Berry’s Dear Boy was described as a ‘blazing debut’, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2013. Stranger, Baby, its follow-up, is marked by the same sense of fantasy and play, estrangement and edgy humour for which she has become known. But these poems delve deeper again, in their off-kilter and often painful encounter with childhood loss. This is a book of mourning, recrimination, exhilaration and ‘oceanic feeling’: ‘A meditation on a want that can never be answered.’
TweetReviews
Emily Berry's second collection, the follow-up to 2013's Dear Boy, is a beautiful and strange thing. In it, the poet contemplates the childhood loss of her mother through formally complex verse rich with images of a deeply-felt, lifelong grief. “Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the sea and show it to a person,” she says in one of the poems, seeming to capture something of how it feels to wrestle nebulous, oceanic pain into meaning.
