Pella Felton reviews Neon Pastoral by Valerie Perreault
Perreault, Valerie (2025) Neon Pastoral (Poetry Collection). The Ashland Poetry Press. 97p. $17.95 (Paperback) Winner – 2024 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize
Early in Neon Pastoral, Valerie Perreault addresses the mysterious subject of her Richard Snyder Memorial Prize-winning collection with a bold promise: “You are almost ready to be born, baby.” Perreault means this in both a beat and a literal context. On a narrative level, the “baby” is Lala, the mysterious protagonist whom Perreault’s audacious beat poems address, usually in the second voice.
However, this declaration reads more like an apology than a celebration. Neon Pastoral isn’t interested in celebrating the landscape in the traditional pastoral sense; Lala must first survive it like a sojourn through hell.
In many ways, Neon Pastoral functions as a modern Divine Comedy—a three-act journey through an inferno where hell is postmodern, capitalist, and viscous. Perreault pits her screaming banshee protagonist against a never-ending gauntlet of needs, wants, desires, and intrusions which she must learn to endure and assimilate herself into. Images in the collection constantly attack Lala’s sensorium, identity, and sense of self. However, as the images of the poems evolve, the hellscape also encompasses Lala’s own body. Perreault invokes a relationship with the corporeal self which is typified by the visceral grossness of an octopus heart or looking in the mirror at a “sad man with no child.” In “TMTWS (The Machine That We Serve)” recurring images of “egg-shaped pods” and a machine called “Your Honor Your Holy Chosen Eggness That Wants Only Your Essence” suggest a dysphoric version of Lala that isn’t simply being born; she is about to crack.
What makes Lala’s traumatic journey so compelling—and often hilarious—is the precision with which Perreault applies her narrative voice. This collection exhibits an exceptional mastery of style and wit that rewards casual and deep reads equally. This hell doesn’t need unpacking; Perreault’s words fly at the reader like detritus moving through the transom, providing both vessel and obstacle for her formidable and surprising touchstone images. Her sentence structures, her inventive and unexpected turns of phrase, and her willingness to reject easy metaphors reflect an uncompromising artist who knows exactly what she wants to say and how she wants to say it. As much as she is interested in exploring the existential nightmares of being alive, Perreault refuses to give herself or the reader any credit for this lofty goal.
Consequently, Perreault often buries the leads of her poems behind poetic cul-de-sacs. The opening to “The Funniest Planet” provides a structurally subversive and counterintuitive way into a classic poetic cliché:
When the cage rattles
it reminds me that I live within one .
This off-balance couplet cleverly subverts more traditional and clichéd constructions of the caged bird metaphor in verse. Perreault knows we already understand the poetic image of the cage, so she instead centers the phenomenal experience of the imprisoned Lala, thus extending the metaphor. Other times, such as in “Snow Leopardess,” she decries the inadequacy of style and poetics to speak to the cruel and crass realities of modern existence:
Call the police
nobody gives a shit about your slant rhyme
when we’re shooting each other in the streets
Which we are .
Perreault’s assaultive, maximalist poem titles—”VR feline LARPing Pills for Coping in the Apocalypse” and “Pantone Color-of-the-Year Canaries as Part of the Khloe Kardashian Collection” are my favorites—reflect a sarcastic skepticism of larger poetics. Her preference for references to McDonald’s, the Kardashians, and Amazon Prime aesthetically rejects attempts to read too deeply into the collection. Even when Perreault is integrating herself into more familiar modes of beat poetry like “TMTWS,” which feels grounded in the Gil Scott-Heron school of beat, she finds ways to explode the rhythm, rebel from it, and play with it.
Still, this playful sarcasm conceals a deeper and more personal—and occasionally more hopeful—center. The structure and arc of Neon Pastoral elevate the collection from being just an exercise in brilliant voice and verse to something meant to live inside our bodies. Poems from the second act of the collection such as “Little Dove” describe a protagonist where a “slow ripening” and “sweet melon smell” have given way to a more ascendant version of Lala. Other poems like “Adventure Song” explicitly initiate her into the pleasure of the physical world, inviting her to “Roll down your socks, Lala. / Feel the wheat against your legs,” suggesting that even if our body is hell, it is the only way to see the sun. The collection’s title describes a transcendent moment on a small sailboat where Perreault, no longer obscured by her relationship with Lala, suggests that:
All of this will have been worth it,
for the hatch on the sailboat… onto my dreaming face.
The first and last poems center this collection. “Sensory Deprivation” and “The Soul Loves the Body (It Looks Like Dancing)” provide fascinating bookends for the body attached to that dreaming face. This symmetry seems intentional. I wonder if the second-person lyric voice used to talk to Lala is a temporally removed version of Lala herself… that is to say, perhaps Valerie Perreault is writing to a version of herself. Regardless of this interpretation, these two short poems—non-representative of the collection as a whole—do much labor in centering Lala’s body as the canvas on which this carnival will take place. This frame creates a much-needed mentorship in embodiment and learning how to live within an ecosystem that is constantly trying to destroy her.
Yet this mentorship never lets us, as readers, forget the commodified, corporatized, almost prosaic landscape this body lives in. Neon Pastoral uses quotidian imprints of capitalism to center poems to brand its nightmare onto our everyday world. The poems rarely stray far from the immediacy of our daily life, yet by no means endorse that immediacy. Perreault seems to be preparing Lala to survive their current moment rather than triumph over it. For those of us reckoning with the same struggles, this journey feels frighteningly prescient.
Maybe we are all Lala, and we’re all about to be born again… in hell.
Neon Pastoral is currently available for purchase through most online retailers and through Ashland Poetry Press at www.ashlandpoetrypress.com You can find out more about the author at https://www.valerieperreault.com
Pella Felton is a poet, performer, and independent scholar stationed out of Northwest Ohio. She holds a certificate in Performance Studies from Bowling Green University and has performed her work at various poetry festivals and events throughout the Midwest including the Toledo Fringe Festival, BGSU Winter Wheat Literary Festival, and the Literary Underground Festival. She is also an accomplished media and performance scholar who frequently presents her research at conferences such as the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, The Great Lakes Association of Sound Studies, and the Society for Media and Cinema Studies. Pella lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.
