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Neon Pastoral - PREORDERS OPEN NOW!
Valerie Perreault
ISBN: 978-1-964957-02-9
Winner of 2024 Richard Snyder Poetry Prize, selected by Matthew Rohrer
Neon Pastoral is currently at the printer and should be completed by mid October 2025, at the latest.
All preordered copies are signed with an option to add a note for a special inscription at checkout!
When the preordered copies ship I will send an email blast to my mailing list to give everyone a heads up. If you’re not on my mailing list please consider hopping on there (I never spam)!
I'm thrilled to share with you that my full-length poetry collection, Neon Pastoral, has been selected by Matthew Rohrer as the winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Book Prize and will be published by Ashland Press in late 2025.
Below is a summary of the book taken from the publishers promotional materials:
“Blending dark humor, storytelling, and magic realism, Valerie Perreault's Neon Pastoral is a visionary, mythic journey through the fragmented unconscious of a lost pilgrim in a posthuman world. Part eclectic travel log, part guidebook, it examines the Western cultural story and its effects on individual and collective evolution. These poems are an intimate hero’s journey through violence, grief, despair, longing, redemption, and ultimately a return home.
Contemptuous and tender by turns, Perreault laughs while she weaves her rich personal folklore through vignettes of everyday life and surreal imagined landscapes. The imagery is strange, cinematic, and unforgettable: a woman reaches her hand into the mouth of a wolf and strokes its tongue; a phone booth rings in the middle of the desert; an old bearded man kayaks down a river that cuts through a burning forest; a woman leaps out of a window mid-sentence.
Perreault sings a low, life-affirming, incantatory song, and she taps you on the shoulder, asking you to join her.”
Read what early reviews are saying:
The mysterious Lala threads her way through these marvelously weird and irreverent poems that leap confoundingly from one subject to the next like a best friend telling you several stories at once. And her stories are about all the things we share in common in this world — Taco Bell, REM, emoticons, TikTok — and all the ways we still manage to create selves that are strange and estranged from the collective. The imagination in these poems is unrestrained, the voice is wry and the profound questions about life and meaning are sugar coated with hilarious and smart-ass set ups. By the end you’ll realize you’ve taken your medicine without noticing it.
―Matthew Rohrer
These delightfully lively poems feature a very interesting voice that speaks directly to the reader, yet is just unreliable enough to provide lots of surprises as the poems veer and jump from ironic to serious to kooky and back. As with a riveting movie, I was afraid I would miss something if I blinked.
―Billy Collins
Open Valerie Perreault’s Neon Pastoral and be enveloped in non-stop brilliant language hitched to quick wit. Things happen fast. And often. Her world is unique although you will immediately recognize it. She has drained off the ordinary and stabs nouns into sentences like no one else ― castrato poets, banshees, carnival donkeys, astroturf and misplaced souls show us the significant in the neglected parts of life. She is for certain the wittiest poet on the funniest planet.
―John Skoyles
Reading Valerie Perreault’s Neon Pastoral is like unearthing a time capsule of late Gen X ephemera while plunging across and beyond history, accompanying the orphaned self and the elusive Lala, the speaker’s stand-in and foil, in her mythic, feminist, wildly inventive and idiosyncratic quest toward psychical transformation. It’s no surprise that Perreault is also a visual artist—the imagery in this haunting debut is immersive, cinematic, at times, surreal. I can’t get enough of the voice, self-deprecating, wry, ironic, weaving an origin song from her grief that will defy the precarity of her roots: “Strength is a sonnet building on itself,/ a villanelle. You are alive./ Right now. Breathing/ in the exhale/ of the defiant tree/ inside the highway median.”
-- Lindsay Bernal
Valerie Perreault
ISBN: 978-1-964957-02-9
Winner of 2024 Richard Snyder Poetry Prize, selected by Matthew Rohrer
Neon Pastoral is currently at the printer and should be completed by mid October 2025, at the latest.
All preordered copies are signed with an option to add a note for a special inscription at checkout!
When the preordered copies ship I will send an email blast to my mailing list to give everyone a heads up. If you’re not on my mailing list please consider hopping on there (I never spam)!
I'm thrilled to share with you that my full-length poetry collection, Neon Pastoral, has been selected by Matthew Rohrer as the winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Book Prize and will be published by Ashland Press in late 2025.
Below is a summary of the book taken from the publishers promotional materials:
“Blending dark humor, storytelling, and magic realism, Valerie Perreault's Neon Pastoral is a visionary, mythic journey through the fragmented unconscious of a lost pilgrim in a posthuman world. Part eclectic travel log, part guidebook, it examines the Western cultural story and its effects on individual and collective evolution. These poems are an intimate hero’s journey through violence, grief, despair, longing, redemption, and ultimately a return home.
Contemptuous and tender by turns, Perreault laughs while she weaves her rich personal folklore through vignettes of everyday life and surreal imagined landscapes. The imagery is strange, cinematic, and unforgettable: a woman reaches her hand into the mouth of a wolf and strokes its tongue; a phone booth rings in the middle of the desert; an old bearded man kayaks down a river that cuts through a burning forest; a woman leaps out of a window mid-sentence.
Perreault sings a low, life-affirming, incantatory song, and she taps you on the shoulder, asking you to join her.”
Read what early reviews are saying:
The mysterious Lala threads her way through these marvelously weird and irreverent poems that leap confoundingly from one subject to the next like a best friend telling you several stories at once. And her stories are about all the things we share in common in this world — Taco Bell, REM, emoticons, TikTok — and all the ways we still manage to create selves that are strange and estranged from the collective. The imagination in these poems is unrestrained, the voice is wry and the profound questions about life and meaning are sugar coated with hilarious and smart-ass set ups. By the end you’ll realize you’ve taken your medicine without noticing it.
―Matthew Rohrer
These delightfully lively poems feature a very interesting voice that speaks directly to the reader, yet is just unreliable enough to provide lots of surprises as the poems veer and jump from ironic to serious to kooky and back. As with a riveting movie, I was afraid I would miss something if I blinked.
―Billy Collins
Open Valerie Perreault’s Neon Pastoral and be enveloped in non-stop brilliant language hitched to quick wit. Things happen fast. And often. Her world is unique although you will immediately recognize it. She has drained off the ordinary and stabs nouns into sentences like no one else ― castrato poets, banshees, carnival donkeys, astroturf and misplaced souls show us the significant in the neglected parts of life. She is for certain the wittiest poet on the funniest planet.
―John Skoyles
Reading Valerie Perreault’s Neon Pastoral is like unearthing a time capsule of late Gen X ephemera while plunging across and beyond history, accompanying the orphaned self and the elusive Lala, the speaker’s stand-in and foil, in her mythic, feminist, wildly inventive and idiosyncratic quest toward psychical transformation. It’s no surprise that Perreault is also a visual artist—the imagery in this haunting debut is immersive, cinematic, at times, surreal. I can’t get enough of the voice, self-deprecating, wry, ironic, weaving an origin song from her grief that will defy the precarity of her roots: “Strength is a sonnet building on itself,/ a villanelle. You are alive./ Right now. Breathing/ in the exhale/ of the defiant tree/ inside the highway median.”
-- Lindsay Bernal