Valerie Perreault is a voice from a generation straddled between the "before time" and this time of rapid development. Blending dark humor, storytelling, and magic realism her Neon Pastoral takes us on a visionary and mythological journey through the fragmented unconscious of a lost pilgrim in a posthuman world. Both an eclectic travel log and guidebook that explores the dynamics of the Western cultural story and its effects on individual and collective evolution. Perreault's poems are an intimate hero's journey through violence, grief, despair, longing, redemption, and ultimately a return home. Both contemptuous and tender, she laughs while she weaves her rich personal folklore through vignettes of familiar everyday life and surreal imagined landscapes. And the imagery is strange: a woman reaches her hand into the mouth of a wolf and pets 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.
Valerie Perreault is a poet and visual artist. Born an only child into a military family in New Jersey, she grew up in Wisconsin and Illinois. She graduated from the Art Institute of Dallas, worked in Austin and Boston, lived some years aboard a sailboat, and has settled in the Florida Keys. She has owned an art gallery, been a bartender, an infomercial scriptwriter, an editor for the Texas Governor's Media Corps, and a ballroom dance instructor. She has permanent art installations worldwide including, The South Beach Ritz Carlton, Hotel Saint Elm, Royal Caribbean Cruises and The Summit Club, Las Vegas. This is her first book.
"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, Author of Army of Giants and 2025 Richard Snyder Prize Judge
"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, Author of Yes and No, and former Director of Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center
"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, Author of What It Doesn't Have To Do With, winner of National Poetry Series
