OILY DOILY

Poetry. Bench Editions, 2024. Paperback, 127 pages. 5" x 7"

An electrifying, eclectic collection of poems that gnaws on violence and the art object. Oily Doily moves through the musical and digital to delve our culture deeply and witness, unblinking.

In Alyssa Perry's alchemical Oily Doily, lyric opens its throat at the vanishing point to pose as vision's dubious double—I see the eyes—and assonance offers up its juicy fruit, its noosey loop. From its "clarisonic" prelude to its Solarian terminus, Perry renders optics as orbit and icon, both the limit of human presence and the interface where immanence still might knock. Fizzy, fatal stuff. —Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles

Razor-edged, stagger-rhymed, Oily Doily is a diamond saw. Its music is intricate and remorseless as its subject: empire, centuries of bourgeois kitsch, 80s flicks, tech strip-mining our curiosity, sympathy, and desire for solidarity. Miraculously, the work doesn’t fall for despair but offers clarity within clarity, glittering surfaces within aqueous depths. You’ll emerge from this debut wire-crossed and Perry-pilled. After a hundred pages, I’d gladly read two hundred more. —Joe Hall, author of Fugue & Strike