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Amy Key and Rebecca Perry in conversation
June 8 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Join us to hear poets Amy Key and Rebecca Perry in conversation about their non fiction debuts, ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE and ON TRAMPOLINING.
Arrangements in Blue:
Notes on Loving and Making a Life
Amy Key
When poet Amy Key was growing up, she looked forward to a life shaped by romance, fuelled by desire, longing and the conventional markers of success that come when you share a life with another person. But that didn’t happen for her.
Now in her forties, she sets out to explore the realities of a life lived in the absence of romantic love. Using Joni Mitchell’s seminal album Blue – which shaped Key’s expectations of love – as an anchor, Arrangements in Blue elegantly honours a life lived completely by, and for, oneself. Building a home, travelling alone, choosing whether to be a mother, recognising her own milestones, learning the limits of self-care and the expansive potential of self-friendship, Key uncovers the many forms of connection and care that often go unnoticed.
With profound candour and intimacy, ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE explores the painful feelings we are usually too ashamed to discuss: loneliness, envy, grief and failure. The result is a book which inspires us to live and love more honestly.
Amy Key is a poet and writer based in London. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe and Isn’t Forever, which was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and a Book of the Year in the Guardian, New Statesman and The Times. Her poems have been widely published and anthologised, and her essays have appeared in At the Pond, Granta, the Poetry Review and elsewhere.
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On Trampolining£11.00
On Trampolining
Rebecca Perry
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.
Rebecca Perry was born in 1986 in London. 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, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published by Bloodaxe in 2021. ON TRAMPOLINING is her non-fiction debut.
