Announcing the release
of my award-winning book,
neon pastoral — Preorders now open!
I’m thrilled to share with you that my debut 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.
“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.”
“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 (more on Matthew here)
“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
“Open Valerie Perreault’s Neon Pastoral and be enveloped in non-stop brilliant language .. She is for certain the wittiest poet on the funniest planet.”
— John Skoyles (more on John here)
“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.
About Valerie
Valerie Perreault is an poet and visual artist. Her work often deals with familial folklore, fragmented and mystical realities, absurdity, and the humor of living in the modern Western cultural story…
