On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
by Lucia Perillo
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""Perillo's poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake, she pulls readers into the beat and whirl of her slyly devastating descriptions."-Booklist" Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo. She writes accessible, often funny poems that border on the profane."-Time Out New YorkThe poetry of Lucia Perillo is fierce, tragicomic, and contrarian, with show more subjects ranging from coyotes and Scotch broom to local elections and family history. Formally braided, Perillo gathers strands of the mythic and mundane, of media and daily life, as she faces the treachery of illness and draws readers into poems rich in image and story.When you spend many hours alone in a room you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself- this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it, from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum, who walked four days into the jungle and stayed for the kindness of the tribe- who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?Lucia Perillo's Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the Bobbitt award from the Library of Congress. She lives in Seattle, Washington. "-- show lessTags
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Although Lucia Perillo’s sixth collection of poems offers little comfort to the optimistic, if you’ve ever been crippled by choice in a department store or experienced an existential crisis reading the comments section of a website, there is some catharsis to be found in these pages. These poems perfectly capture the pervasive unease of life under late capitalism. In “My Father Kept the TV On,” she laments the “…green republic where the pilgrims came to land!” and proclaims, “If I’m going to choose my nostalgia it is a no-brainer/that I’m going to side with books, with the days/before the lithium-ion battery…”
Perillo imagines suburban denizens “swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance” and show more shares the sensation of manufactured majesty induced by a visit to a home improvement superstore: “You know/you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating/everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II/commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.”
In these poems, the Earth, however neglected, still manages to be both beautiful and terrifying, “glowing so lit-up’dly” from space where one cannot see the junk that fills our oceans and our homes, where far below we are “Queasy from our spinning but still holding on,/with no idea we are so brightly shining.” show less
Perillo imagines suburban denizens “swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance” and show more shares the sensation of manufactured majesty induced by a visit to a home improvement superstore: “You know/you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating/everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II/commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.”
In these poems, the Earth, however neglected, still manages to be both beautiful and terrifying, “glowing so lit-up’dly” from space where one cannot see the junk that fills our oceans and our homes, where far below we are “Queasy from our spinning but still holding on,/with no idea we are so brightly shining.” show less
"On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths" is an amazing book of poetry, at once both beautiful and devastating. Perillo focuses her poems on chronic illness, living with death, and her knowledge as a naturalist, but she never completely abandons emotion for science. Her poems have so many levels I'm sure I haven't plumbed the depths. Worthy of reading, re-reading, and re-reading again.
"while the books lay open, scattered facedown like turtles sunning..." Beautiful simile! The poems are enchanting and very accessible. I wish more poems were included because I still didn't have a sense of who the author was. A meditation on the lives of dogs of privilege was LOL funny. I think a clever high school student would enjoy these as much as an adult.
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Lucia Perillo was born in Manhattan, New York on September 30, 1958. She received a bachelor's degree in wildlife management from McGill University in 1979 and went to work for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. She received a master's degree in English from Syracuse University while working seasonally at Mount Rainer National Park. She show more taught at Syracuse University, Southern Illinois University, Saint Martin's University, and Warren Wilson College. She was a poet and essayist. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1988 and published her first book, Dangerous Life, a year later. Her collections of poetry include Inseminating the Elephant, which won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems. She was also the author of a book of essays entitled I've Heard the Vultures Singing and a short story collection entitled Happiness Is a Chemical on the Brain. In 2000, she received a MacArthur Genius fellowship. She died on October 16, 2016 at the age of 58. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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