David Perry

David Perry is the author of two books of poems, Range Finder (Adventures in Poetry) and Expat Taxes (Seaweed Salad/French [Concession] Press), as well as two chapbooks, Knowledge Follows (Insurance Editions) and New Years (Braincase Books). He is based in Shanghai, where he teaches in the Writing Program at NYU Shanghai and lives with his partner, the artist Monika Lin, and their daughter.

Of his recent work, Richard Roundy writes that "David Perry’s poems are charged, feverish meditations written in the wave/particle light of our current digitized reality. Memory and language, both personal and collective, create the selves we’re constantly calling into question, submerged as we are in the confusion that ensues when we try to figure it all out. But don’t worry, Perry gifts us these essential instructions: 'Stop. Sit down. Relax. Think. Witness/ unlimited growth in all directions” so that we remember “All possibility to the point of extinction/ is consciousness…'"

Mark Wallace, in his review of Range Finder, writes: "Perry’s bon mots are sometimes designed to expose human shortcomings, but more often they share the mutual foibles and failures that make people and the world lovable even when part of us wishes they weren’t … there are distractions and entertainments, dalliances and affairs, connections and misunderstandings. Range Finder is not only well worth reading, but also worth taking around. Take it with you lightly, but don’t take it lightly. Read it like you’re having a conversation, one which you greatly enjoy but ends up teaching you more than you first realize."

Perry is presently working on a set of book projects that engage the complex history and present of Shanghai, his home of some ten years, as both a cosmopolitan entrepôt and a site of cultural, linguistic and political hybridity, anxiety, tension and fraught (and yet often remarkable) creativity.