New Book by NH Poet Laureate

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 14^th 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 21^st 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