On Trampolining Rebecca Perry
- Standard edition comes with a limited print
- Deluxe edition (the most beautiful version) includes a signed book, an emroidered patch, bookmark and print–wrapped in hand-stamped book-wrap. 100 only!
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- Irish customers – please buy this from The Library Project (Dublin)
A short, taut masterclass in poetic memoir. Beautifully universal about girlhood, sport, changing bodies, the borderlands of childhood play and adult expectation.”
About the book
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.
Praise
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. ”
Inua 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
About the author
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.
Events and Press
The Sportswriters: Eimear Ryan & Rebecca Perry in conversation with Emma Larkin – Listowel Writers’ Week, County Kerry, Ireland. Tickets
Rebecca Perry and Amy Key in conversation about their non-fiction debuts – Pages of Hackney, London. Tickets
Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4 – Wednesday 31st May – 2023. Listen again
Specification
- Format
- Paperback
- Trim Size
- 198 x 150 mm
- Pagination
- 112 pp
- Publication Date
- 26 May 2023
- ISBN
- 978-1-7396160-1-4
- Designer
- Patrick Fisher of Frontwards Design
- Production Spec
- Munken Lynx, full-colour offset litho, section sewn perfect binding with flapped covers
- Distributor
- Inpress Books / Ingram Publisher Services
- Trade Categories
- Essays
- Subjects
- Sport, the Body, Memory