Searching for Petco
by
Skylar Alexander
This is a book for the lost. A book for the bruised—for those plied from the path with snake oil and sophistry, only to stumble out of the underbrush, hollowed out and bloodied, to begin again.
Searching for Petco is a manic mixtape of impressions, snippets of song lyrics, and the 24-hour news cycle on shuffle; it’s a reckoning of the moments that define a life withheld—a story of unchecked destruction, violence, and erasure of the self. Follow its heroine as she reaps meaning from the cultivars of Buddhist philosophy and pop culture, grafting together her truth from tongue-in-cheek observations, unpopular hashtags, and fierce declarations of love and war and self that spiral outward.
These poems grapple with the self and with self-harm; with permission and survival; with grandmas and mixtapes; with dust bunnies and doom; with making poisonous gas and becoming air; with craving and professional wrestling; with blobfish and leeches; with Norman Reedus and vegans; with Klingons and Iggy Pop; with friends loved and lost; with getting lost; and—yes—with searching for Petco.
Praise for Searching for Petco:
In Skylar Alexander’s Searching for Petco, a coming-of-age story unfolds in reverse: first we meet a sardonically self-aware millennial who knows the ways she’s let her identity become monetized and boxed into 140 characters, but is too savvy to stop side-hustling. Searching for something beyond commodified selfhood, she becomes an avatar-heroine of video games and pure imagination, insisting that real desire might yet exist beyond all the scripts of digital culture, the gig economy, and gender. She’s desirous in a way a woman isn’t supposed to be, repeating “I want, I want, I want” even as she confronts sexual violence with guns strapped to her heels. Try as she might to guard her heart, she can’t, and so she crashes through to her roots, arriving at the rusted-out Midwestern river town hiding inside “the cellar door / of [her] ribcage,” driving around lost, searching for Petco. Amidst urban ruins, family ghosts, and dried-up pensions, she never locates the store or the person she used to be, but instead affirms that she always was who she is—the knowing that hurls so many artists out of the nest. In this gutsy, acrobatic, and heartfelt first collection, using innovative forms that dazzle the eye and ear, Alexander’s voice of her generation reaches us—“we American trashcans full of unfilterable noise”—by ringing out too urgently to ignore.
—Becca Klaver, author of Empire Wasted and Ready for the World
In Searching for Petco, Skylar Alexander creates spaces to explore devastating tragedy alongside everyday concerns, and she does so with fluid ingenuity in both form and language, yet the language has a precise directness to it that often startles the reader into moments of profound clarity. And throughout the book, there's a tantalizing propulsion with which we speed down the halls of, say, millennialness (is that even a word?), and along the way we glimpse portraits of humor, insight, and an undercurrent of frustration, even anger. And truth. Always truth. Alexander's voice is urgent, candid, and much needed. Searching for Petco is a startling and memorable debut.
—Keith Lesmeister, author of We Could Have Been Happy Here
Skylar Alexander’s Searching for Petco is a restless, fearless debut collection. ‘A harvesting of halos’, these poems are myth-making and myth-dismantling: seeking, out of the materials of the present, a new kind of holiness. We must ‘go slow / and see the damage / or the damage will take you’. Alexander writes into the damage to wrest solace from the modern dislocation and loss of self: not by rejecting the modern, but by taking up the masks it offers and making them speak a fresh, troubling, and beautiful language. Searching for Petco is an urgent, feverous, and brilliant debut from a poet to be followed.
—Chad Campbell, author of Laws & Locks and Nectarine
Searching for Petco is a mutant blast radius of righteous Midwestern anger and tender observation. Alexander takes a fire axe to our tech-bound, corporate-branded culture, wrecks misogyny and patriarchy with a fire axe, and turns hashtags into piercing poetic jabs. These poems are for all of us frustrated citizens searching for hope in the cruelty and gracelessness, all of us running errands, looking for a store in a strip mall, but finding a river, a sky, a friend instead.
—Adam Fell, author of Dear Corporation and I Am Not A Pioneer
Furious, on fire, and achingly caustic, these poems tear through the page as you read, searching for a moment of rest in a reckless world, a moment where, like "the lava of my body | turning | there’s a Shinto god," verse might fuse frustration into insight. This book is a wild ride through that heroic quest.
—Lauren Haldeman, author of Instead of Dying and Calenday