Announcing the upcoming release

of my award-winning book,

neon pastoral


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 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.

“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)



“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.

Matthew Rohrer (more on Matthew here)


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…