Lucia Perillo (1958–2016)

Once upon a time, when I fancied myself a poet and my undergraduate life was consumed by creative writing classes and editing journals, my very first creative writing professor (where, o where are you now, Jon Marshall?) recommended I read The Body Mutinies. I forget the particular reason why he recommended it, other than mentioning how Perillo writes about developing MS, but finally reading this now, it does ring true with my late teens, early twenties self. I have to say I liked this collection more for the ideas and overall images it invoked--I especially like the poems exploring youth and femininity--than the language itself. Favorites:
-"Durable Goods"
-"The Life Opaque"
-"Lost Innocence of the Potato Givers"
-"On the Sunken Fish Processor Tenyo Maru"
-"The Professor Wonders If His Daughter Will Understand Tragedy"
-"The Roots of Pessimism in Model Rocketry, The Fallacy of Its Premise"
-"Retablo with Multiple Sclerosis and Saints"
-"Elephant" (wildly jealous she saw Raymond Carver read)
-"July 4, 1966"
-"Needles"
-"For My Washer and Dryer"
-"Archaeolgy of the Bed"
-"On the Female Serial Killers"
-"Barbie Tells Her Biography"

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Counting as my volume of poetry for the Read Harder challenge.… (más)

This book id part memoir, part philosophy, and part sociology, of how handicapped people function today and are treated. the author spends the first third on physical handicaps, and their affects on the person and the how to deal with them. The author then moves to the social handicaps, especially in outdoor activities. Then, the last quarter is more philosophical, on how an individual remains happy under the constraints and interacts in mostly a positive way with the non-handicapped. The recollections of being way out there in nature are pleasant reading and are interspersed throughout, usually introducing a topic.… (más)

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 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.”… (más)