Rebecca Perry

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

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. 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 a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Stone Fruit

Book 1 of the Wind Ships Series

The Pirate Hunters

I thought I would never see him again. But here he is, standing there, not a care in the world. No thought to the pain he caused me a year ago. Ruby thought she could move on from her break-up with best friend Danny until he shows up at her university campus with a quick smile, sexy abs and eyes that you could easily drown in. Ruby resolves to stay away, not entangling her heart again. But her hormones have other ideas, leading to a steamy night with Danny before she can think better of it. When the two lovers reconnect, how long will it last before the issues that broke them up the first time, start rearing their ugly head?

Rebecca Perry

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