Perreault, Valerie: Neon Pastoral

Ashland Poetry Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 15, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 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.