Beauty/Beauty

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.

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, such as the killing of Bigfoot and a slave on a slave ship. 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".