When Rebecca Perry was growing up, she competed nationally and internationally as a trampolinist. This immersive and compelling book deftly blends memoir and lyrical nonfiction to explore a time she 'chose air over earth' and intensive schedules of practice. From the aerial views of English sports halls and international stadiums, to the texture of a fingernail pressed against silver beads on a leotard, Perry's explorations are immersive, sensuous, funny, traumatic and tender. In 'On Trampolining', Perry weaves arresting tales on pain, expectation, flight and grief in relation to competitive sport, memory and the body. 'A short, taut masterclass in poetic memoir. Beautifully universal about girlhood, sport, changing bodies, the borderlands of childhood play and adult expectation.'--Max Porter; 'In her elegant and intelligent meditation on the art of trampolining, Rebecca Perry writes movingly on pain, grief, love, and self-will. The beauty and economy of her sentences, and her frank but unselfpitying attention to the power and frailty of the body, recalls the work of Maggie Nelson and Gillian Rose, but is entirely hers. I loved it'--Sarah Perry; 'On Trampolining is a jewel of an essay, where like the most gifted artisan, Rebecca Perry reconstructs shattered pieces of a life spent loftily, into a fragile work of quivering wonder, of flesh and bone and sparkling clarity. I read it swiftly, holding my breath the whole way through.'--Innua Ellams; 'A tremendous, compelling read. It sheds light on a sport I know nothing about, and the pressures it takes to be even very, very good at something, let alone close to the best in the world.'--Rishi Dastidar

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, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. 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 also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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.

In 2011, Poetry Wales magazine awarded the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Poetry Prize for the third time. The judges, Zoe Skoulding and John Barnie, made their selection of the best short collection of poems, submitted anonymously, with the winner receiving GBP250 and publication of their world by Seren, Wales' leading literary publisher. The 2011 winning collection is 'little armoured' by Rebecca Perry. "little armoured is a brilliant book, which emits light and heat like the electric heater one of its poems describes as a humming like a bee in the corner of the room, its orangeness brighter than your eyes expect. Its miniatures and transforming images sometimes recall Elizabeth Bishop, its tonally various sequences Paul Muldoon, but this is a young poet who already discovered her own voice in these exact and tender, smart and moving poems." John McAuliffe Don't forget to subscribe to Poetry Wales Magazine!