Alexandria Peary

Alexandria Peary Poems

Love's balustrade, love's balcony
a few iron words that can be seen anywhere still
in grocery lists, in laundry hung between two objects,
an e-mail, in an apology, in a thought about the weather
...

Toss in some wavy lines, an equal sign, and a squiggle,
then a lilac log, boulders with faces, a few phrases
like rock walls, twin marks from wagon wheels on granite.
The tell-tale lilacs give away the cellar hole:
...

In another poem, called The Logic of Spring,
a mechanical drawing of a tree
that I've passed a 100 times
on my way to a different problem.
...

Glued-on trees alternating with
strips of bricks and little pieces of song
taped up everywhere as green and pink diamonds
...

Alexandria Peary Biography

The child of a German mother and American father, Alexandria Peary grew up in the country store her parents owned in central Maine. She earned a BA at Colby College, MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a PhD in Composition from the University of New Hampshire. Her poetry collections include Fall Foliage Called Bathers & Dancers (2008), Lid to the Shadow (2011), which won the Slope Editions Book Prize, and Control Bird Alt Delete (2014), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Peary’s work has been influenced by a variety of figures and sources, from Carl Jung to Emily Dickinson to Buddhist mindfulness practice. She lives a few miles from one of the Robert Frost homesteads in New Hampshire, and her work explores the landscape of New England as well as metalanguage, archetype, and alternative ways of knowing. Laura Mullen said of Peary that she is “one of those wonderful writers who know how to stay, as de Kooning put it, ‘on the edge of something.’” Peary’s honors include the Joseph Langland Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Mudfish Poetry Prize, and the Mary Carver Poetry Prize. She teaches at Salem State University.)

The Best Poem Of Alexandria Peary

The Architecture of a Love Poem

Love's balustrade, love's balcony
a few iron words that can be seen anywhere still
in grocery lists, in laundry hung between two objects,
an e-mail, in an apology, in a thought about the weather
these rusty words, these rusting gates
before a breath, Standing in the cold morning
on a cold blue stairs, with a curlicue of coffee
you look at the word Love written on the
side of the Pharmacy in cherry-vanilla flavored cursive
because this is where a love poem once stood,
what I am saying right now is secretly built over
a love poem, the fossils of a cupola,
pink buildings with red hyphens and dashes
and three red dots, You, second person pink
with shutters you could open with a fingernail
like in an advent calendar to see sticker scenes
of apartments inside: a radiator, a bare arm,
two cups by themselves on a table
The mind of the attic still persists up there
meditative water
and the chairs talking quietly to one another
It's now pink rubble, rhyming bricks, and an illicit balcony
the heart had such a fancy elevator
that it started to look like a bird cage
and once in a lemon-scented fog
near springtime-fresh trees, I heard two people say,
'Yellow kiss-shaped flowers, telephone flowers,
are falling from my mouth now'
Now, it's a set of blue and white checkered apartment buildings
math problems that are eight stories high
a long division jutting as pollution into the sky
laundry, cooking spills, gasoline shirts
commas, theories or arguments of boyfriends & girlfriends
boyfriends & boyfriends, girlfriends & girlfriends,
all hanging out of the window that you opened.

Alexandria Peary Comments

Asit Doloi 14 February 2019

Charming and rich in essence of humanity

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