Stranger, Baby

Emily Berry

"The loss of a mother must be something very strange", observed Sigmund Freud, a reflection that haunts this intense and powerful new book. Stranger, Baby is Emily Berry's second collection of poetry. These poems are filled with fantasy and play, estrangement, and edgy humor. Love, anger, tenderness and violence all find expression in poems powered by grief's tidal undertow. This is a book of mourning, recrimination, exhilaration, and "oceanic feeling", where familiarity meets strangeness and despair becomes a kind of celebration.