Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak
Alexandria Peary
Spuyten Duyvil (2022) [available now]
In
this new book, New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary offers a
high-spirited exploration of the vexations of life in 2020-2021, from social
media giants to pandemic inequity to a concrete poem about a landfill. Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak is
a book distinctly for the times, with a glance back at recent politics in the
United States. Federal judges hide behind houseplants, a sonnet explodes from
sexism, statues of penthouse dictators are toppled, and a mountain threatens to
drop on top of someone as an act of homophobia. Poems take on social media: emoji
are at war in a mural outside the cafeteria of a social media company; there
are troll farms and cyber-attacks by bootlegger hornets; and 100,000 early
Christian martyrs try to figure out the on-switch to a lost-and-found I-pad in
a crypt.
The
poems interact with other kinds of writing, including wedding announcements,
grant applications, and immigration policies, as Peary reconsiders issues of
originality, repurposing, and quoting. Battle
of Silicon Valley at Daybreak dissolves boundaries of genre, opening with an
ars poetica introduction and closing
with a prose piece, “Deca-Meron,” which refashions Boccaccio’s 14th
century account of plague. Da Vinci’s The
Last Supper is transposed onto a VFW Hall for a bachelor’s party. A Clarice
Lispector short story turns into a trash-can raid by nocturnal wildlife. After
biting a blue “apple,” a narrator in another poem goes on a wild ride in a 21st
century remake of Adam-Eve’s choice, this one involving cyber criminals, the
dark web. As Peary says, who would have guessed? She sheds innocence of “just being
a poet” or being a citizen, while giving a toast at a feast of reading and
being alive.
Work in this book made previous appearances in New
American Writing, Yale Review, Shearsman Magazine, North American Review, Green
Mountains Review, Hotel Amerika, Boston Review, web Conjunctions, Barrow Street, Plume and elsewhere, with a 2021 nomination for Best of the Net.
Reviews
Laura Mullen says of Alexandria Peary that she is
“one of those wonderful writers who know how to stay, as de Kooning put it, ‘on
the edge of something.’”—Laura Mullen, Poetry Foundation
Words and their things are brought into dramatic tension. As in nature mort, the everyday becomes
sublime in color and relation, but this is not a quiet, painterly book. It is
active and intermittent, and nothing passes its watch. On occasion, Peary
comments through a fourth wall window to address the reader, and poetry itself
is one of the guests at table, “all geometry and glass.”—Paul Hoover on The Water
Draft
What
an exquisitely witty and ingenious book. Alexandria Peary’s The Water Draft plucks experimentalism
out of the dull classrooms of postmodern theory and takes it joyriding through
madhouse America. Half surrealist romp, half anti-art, half taxonomy of our
bizarro nation, these poems are wholly a love song to irreverence. —Jaswinder
Bolina on The Water Draft
Alexandria Peary, writing in the unsentimental tradition of Bishop and Moore, transports their delectable particularity into our distractible age. The Water Draft has an idea of order, but Peary is always pushing past it and into her very own territory, where the unexpected can occur, and does with satisfying regularity. — Donna Stonecipher on The Water Draft
Control
Bird Alt Delete is a great book. It’s descriptive, poetic, interior, and
technological, often within the same sentence. But it’s firmly located in an
American present of rest areas, stores we all know and “men made entirely of
denim” And it sounds great; Peary’s music is just beautiful. —Matthew
Rohrer on Control Bird Alt Delete
The
topos is New England archaeology; it’s Colorforms and Legos; Charley Harper
landscapes become interiors; we are delighted to already find ourselves where
we couldn’t possibly get to.” —Caroline
Knox on Control Bird Alt Delete
Alexandria
Peary reveals the many readers that we are, following labyrinthine lines
through magical—sometimes scary—sculpture gardens made of words…It’s a world
supercharged by an alchemical meta-poetics, making the physical and textual
morph into each other so fluidly, it feels like we’re reading a page that’s
actually water mirroring back at us. —Steve
Healey on The Water Draft
I
can think of few poets of her generation who manage so successfully to fuse
free-wheeling linguistic play with deep emotional force. In a land of easy
answers, she is the guide who asks us, “Where have all the questions gone?”
Peary is a marvel. —Peter
Campion on Lid to the Shadow
Support small presses and local independent bookstores by purchasing Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak at one of these places:
* Through the publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
* Gibson's Bookstore: Gibson's
