Stranger, Baby

Review Highly intelligent, deeply moving poems that provide a new lens through which to consider grief. -- Sarah Crown ― Guardian This is powerful poetry. But it is also clever, modern, and playful. Berry refuses to withhold any of her poetic artillery; she experiments with form boldly, an experiment that might fail in the hands of a weaker writer ... 'Stranger, baby' generates a high voltage; its energy feels dangerous for both writer and reader, and no one who reads it will deny the sparks that fly off it. ― The London Magazine One of the best books of British poetry you are likely to read in 2017 ... a work of extraordinary poetic ability and frankness. -- Todd Swift ― Eyewear Emily Berry has a refreshingly free, not to say incendiary, approach to poetry. ― Observer Berry's 2013 Dear Boy won the Forward Prize for first collection; this book is shortlisted for this year's main award. It doesn't take long to see why. Written in memory of the poet's mother, the first-person poems are an open dissection of loss, trauma and the sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly workings of long-term grief. Reading them is a spiritual experience. ― Financial Times Summer Books 'I'm still haunted by Stranger, Baby (Faber, �10.99) by Forward Prize-winning poet Emily Berry. "A mother's death lasts a lot of years," she writes in her second collection, which is about grief, estrangement and the question of where parent ends and child begins.' -- Johanna Thomas-Corr ― Evening Standard 'No doubt about it, I will read the genius poet Emily Berry's second collection, Stranger, Baby (Faber & Faber), for many years to come. She begins with a Freud quotation: "The loss of a mother must be something very strange." Her subject is indeed the death of a mother. These poems continue this conversation with Freud, forging a strange, tough language to give value to the absurdity and chaos of grief. She manages to be witty, too: "Now all my poems are about death I feel as though I'm really living."' -- Deborah Levy ― New Statesman Product Description 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.' Book Description The second collection from Emily Berry, the award-winning poet of Dear Boy. About the Author Emily Berry's first book of poems is Dear Boy, which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Hawthornden Prize. She is a contributor to The Breakfast Bible and editor of Best British Poetry 2015. A selection of her work appears in Penguin Modern Poets 1: If I'm Scared We Can't Win. She is editor of The Poetry Review.