Creation Myths

Nell Perry's Creation Myths documents two years in disarray. It is a chaotic almanac, a half-baked phenomenology. Each poem is addressed to someone, or something; addressees include works of art, human persons, non-human persons, places, inheritances, private property, practices of preservation, ways of being, ways of understanding, and times of the year. The poems are accompanied by a poetic essay, "Imaginary Deaths", which was written concurrently and shares in many of the same themes. Nell's poetry expresses, in its care toward language and modes of address, a deep care for the "other", and asks what that care looks like in its presence and absence, alike. Creation Myths asks what new myths might look like, what new stories, traditions, and moralities emerge when we expand our care from human to non-human, living to non-living.

Praise for Nell Perry

"Nell Perry's poetry is a kind of etymological and bodily-oriented poetry which was deeply engrossing and felt expansive... Perry's work is work and sometimes a poetics of how meaning escapes and contorts us, of how social forces act upon the conceptions of the body and shift it under our own gaze can only be work, but it is bursting with avenues of exploration and a depth of image that is joy for the attendant reader." - Josh Allsop, "Osmosis"

"Nell Perry's Unspeakable Patterns of the House is an organology of the psyche, the body, technology, the quantum realm and chloroplast, the habitat and the life-forms within it. [To read it] is to feel viscerally into the inherent polyphony and plastiglomerate matters of many agents and abstracted entities: the multivocal discourse of life and death in the anthropocene." - Maria Sledmere, "Blackbox Manifold"

"Nell Perry's poems return to sensation, argument, thought. I thought I knew what it was 'about' - a kind of kick against any vulgar logic of fate, from psychoanalysis to astrology to biology. But each time I read it something different happens, and what could be more pleasing: a living thing."- Luke Roberts

"Nell Perry's Venusberg is a deranged linguistic space; media language structures appropriated, disrupted and regurgitated as new and mutilated text. A fractured and psychotic incarnation of the gendered political machine, distorted into a polyphony of dismembered consumer-capitalist voices." - William Rowe

Nell Perry's publications include Radical Elegies: White Violence, Patriarchy, and Necropoetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022) and four poetry books: Unspeakable Patterns of the House (Salò Press, 2020); Of Parasites & Proximities (Contraband Books, 2017); Meat-Volt -Interruption (Oystercatcher, 2015); and Venusberg (Veer Books, 2015). They edit the online poetry zine DATABLEED with Juha Virtanen.