A collection of three distinct parts, the poems in Rebecca Perry's Stone Fruit nonetheless speak across their many common preoccupations: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form, our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise. Opening with a study of a girl in a miniature portrait, expanding into lyrical prose pieces and closing with a reflective long poem - part elegy and part reflective essay on competitive trampolining - the poems are united by a desire to pay absolute attention to both the material and inner world. The worlds within this collection appear to be teeming with life - crabs push through sand, wasps swarm on meat; and forms change - bones are replaced with metal, a human head transfigures into that of a muntjac - but there is nothing frantic in this shifting. The care taken in the poems to properly look, to focus on stillness and acts of interrogation, often gives the feeling that they are being viewed through glass, or placed in a frame. If this book could be said to have a central demand of the reader, it is to consider whether they will allow themselves to attend to the pain and joy of giving due reflection to what is happening in the world around us, in their lives and the lives of others. And what the cost of that is. Stone Fruit is Rebecca Perry's second collection, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her first collection Beauty/Beauty won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017. It was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize, and was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

About the Author
Rebecca Perry was born in 1986 in London. She graduated from Manchester's Centre for New Writing in 2008 and lives in London. She has published several pamphlets, including little armoured (Seren, 2012), which won the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice; cleanliness of rooms and walls (If a Leave Falls Press, 2017); insect & lilac (2019), co-authored with Amy Key from a joint residency at Halsway Manor (the National Centre for Folk Arts); and beaches (Offord Road Press, 2019). Her first book-length collection, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017, and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Her second book-length collection, Stone Fruit, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, is published by Bloodaxe in 2021.

Reviews
In Beauty/Beauty, she offers female perspectives with openness and vulnerability, in both her themes and experiments with form, to find new ways of writing the feminine. Non-linear images are subverted by shattered narratives, in poems written "from the nose / out, like a painting". Her gaze is not limited to personal experience. It is a triumph of imagination that she is able to empathise with other forms of oppression. She captures the sadness of seas and writes a love poem to a stegosaurus, whose mouth "holds more wonder than a sky full of stars". -- Pascale Petit * chair of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize judges *
We were impressed by the book's refreshing ambition and sophistication, its liveliness and bounce, and how rewarding the poems were as we read and re-read them. -- Judges Professor Deryn Rees-Jones, Professor Karen Leeder and John McAuliffe * 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize *
Richly self-reliant, these are poems for the girl-power generation. In a world where all is relative, subjective and ironic, their breakages and weaknesses and contradictions get as close to something like sincerity as most young poets dare. -- Kate Bingham * Poetry Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9781780375687
Author Rebecca Perry
Format Paperback
Page Count 72
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 8mm