On the spectrum of possible deaths
By: Lucia Perillo
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Port Townsend, Wash
Language: eng
Number of pages: 81
ISBN-13: 9781556593970
Subjects: POETRY / American / General
Description: ""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 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. "--