Donna de la Perrière

The recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry Award and a 2016 Creative Work Grant from Intersection for the Arts, she founded and curated the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series (2004 - 2019) in San Francisco. She teaches at San Francisco State University, and lives in Oakland with poet Joseph Lease and cats Whitman and Dickinson.

Works of Love and Terror

2019
Paperback
94 p.

"In her best book yet, Donna de la Perrière gives us a poetry event for the ages...As the title promises, she runs the gamut from tender and lyrical poems of love and loss to the Dionysian madness of terror. The great setpiece here, 'First Love,' details the chilling life and after-life of a rape as does no other poem I know. There's much strong work here, from the sonorous, hollowed out écriture of 'I Am Trying to Say Fire,' to the noisy consonants and slurry vowels of 'Mock Trial' - sound orchestration like Lorine Niedecker at her best." - Kevin Killian

︎ $15.95

Saint Erasure

2010
Paperback
71 p.

"Anyone who still wants to view experimentation as a purely intellectual exercise will be convinced otherwise by Donna de la Perrière's exquisite second collection. Under the threat or promise of erasure and at the edge of silence, the poet deftly leads us through a shifting, minimalist landscape. Wrestling with change and stasis, with the resistance and sudden give of the real, she delicately monitors each stage of what feels like a pilgrimage, while defamiliarization pressures vision and makes each breath at once artful and endlessly brave. Saint Erasure saves us by exposing the beauty of our vulnerability.” - Laura Mullen

︎ $13.95

True Crime

2009
Paperback
74 p.

"True Crime is a fitting title for this sympathetic and sometimes harrowing family portrait of the American South. The uncle who absconded with the insurance money, the boyfriend who cares more about his muscle car than his dead girlfriend. In such a fragile, wobbling world, language acts as the only shield. This is a wonderful and brave book, offering the true fictions of our actual darkness." - Paul Hoover

︎ $13.95