Dear Boy" is the dramatic & inventive debut by Emily Berry. These characterful intelligent & darkly witty poems explore lives lived strangely in unusual worlds through a series of deft & seductive soliloquies. In a collection with a taste for ventriloquy & wickedness & a flair for vocal cross-dressing the balance of power is always shifting in an unexpected direction
- an ingenue masquerades as a femme fatale a doctor appears more disturbed than his patient & parents seem more unruly than their children. Eccentric intimate arch anxious decadent & sometimes mournful the book's confiding conversational voices tell stories recognisable & refracted carried along by the undercurrent on which the collection ebbs & rides: the anguish & energy brought about by a long-distance love affair which propels & terrorises & ultimately unites the work. " Dear Boy" is an irresistible & enlivening collection by a new poet of startling & various gifts."