The Water Draft

Alexandria Peary, writing in the unsentimental tradition of Bishop and Moore, transports their delectable particularity into our distractible age. Any collection of objects, as Peary knows, makes a still life, whatever the forces that propelled them together: every material fact, be it a word or a movie star or a desk, has the potential to fascinate, when it falls into a receptive line of vision. The Water Draft has an idea of order, but Peary is always pushing past it and into her very own territory, where the unexpected can occur, and does, with satisfying regularity. Peary writes singular poems with “a ballpoint pen / found in a ruined villa.”      Donna Stonecipher, author of Model City