The world of Beauty/Beauty is 'built from the nose/out, like a painting', accumulating its various feelings, ideas, objects, disappointments and joys to the point of almost overflowing. Preoccupied with demise and loss, as well as reimagination and regeneration, Rebecca Perry's debut collection has the duality and symmetry of its title at its core. Beauty/Beauty is a book with tenderness running through its veins, exploring salvation, reparation and the fullness of being alive; the difficulty of defining what love is, the heartbreak, the faraway friends, the overwhelming abundance of things in museums. It is alive with memories, with old loves hanging around in the corners of dark rooms, ghost mouths hidden inside the mouth you are kissing, and eulogies to dearly departed pets. Each poem creates its own tiny world to be lived in and explored; a stegosaurus is adored, a million silver spiders play dead, a list of flowers is not really a list of flowers, adorable dogs want to be friends, the flightless grow wings, and the stars turn green. Beauty/Beauty was 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.
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. Her first pamphlet, little armoured (Seren, 2012), won the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Throughout 2014 Rebecca worked in collaboration with the Glej Theatre in Slovenia, writing a performance piece called Silent City, exploring the lives of European youth. She edits the online journal Poems in Which and was Writer Fellow at Manchester University in 2016, and 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 (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.