Rebecca Perry Readings
‘… Stone Fruit is an accumulation. Perry’s clean, sometimes conversational lines build into a mesmerising intensity.’ - Alycia Pirmohamed, The Poetry Review
Rebecca Perry’s second collection Stone Fruit was published on 27 May 2021. It is a Poetry Book Society Recommendaion. A collection of three distinct parts, the poems 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. The book closes with a reflective long poem – part elegy and part essay – on competitive trampolining.
Her debut collection, Beauty/Beauty won the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize. It was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was 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 2016.
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Stone Fruit was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2021. Rebecca was in conversation with Anthony Anaxagorou for the Poetry Book Society's Instagram Bookclub event on Tuesday 1 June on Instagram Live. Watch here.
Rebecca Perry was interviewed for Canada’s Poetry Extension podcast on 20 May. She was in conversation with Natalya Anderson and read 'The execution was conducted in the open air' from Stone Fruit. Listen to the podcast here.
Stone Fruit was very thoughtfully reviewed alongside another second collection in the summer 2021 issue of The Poetry Review. Also available online here.
PAST EVENTS - JOINT LAUNCH READING
This outstanding international reading and discussion was live-streamed on 19 May 2021. It was a late UK launch for American poet Deborah Landau's fourth collection Soft Targets, published June 2020, and an early launch for Rebecca Perry and Chrissy Williams' second collections Stone Fruit and Low, which are published on 27 May. Deborah joined from her home in Brooklyn, with Rebecca and Chrissy joining from London. Hosted by Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley from his home in Northumberland.
Rebecca Perry read first in each set, followed by Chrissy and then Deborah. In the discussion that followed, they explored the themes of resistance and vulnerability (as Rebecca put it) that connect their three collections. This captivating and wide-ranging conversation begins at 51:30.
[13 August 2021]
