"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 York The 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 roomyou have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortalbut that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught usdo not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bita thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,who walked four days into the jungleand 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.
• Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2009• Perillo left Random House to join Copper Canyon • Executive Editor Michael Wiegers never accepted a book faster than this one • Perillo is a Macarthur “Genius” Fellowship and has been featured on the cover of American Poetry Review • Perillo is the only poet to have won both the Kate Tufts Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award • The biography is of interest: Perillo was a park ranger in the Cascade Mountains and in her 30s she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Now she is in a wheelchair. Many of her poems candidly deal with how she negotiates the disease. Her much-praised nonfiction book, I Heard the Vultures Singing, takes the subject head-on. • The poems are gripping, and it is fair to call this book a “page turner.”
Perillo's previous books of poems have earned: 100 Notable Books of 2012, The New York Times Book Review. It was one of only 2 poetry titles to make the list. 2013 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Associations Award for Poetry 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Full-page reviews in New York Times Book Review and The Nation Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2009 Winner of the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress Macarthur “Genius” Fellowship Perillo has been featured on the cover of American Poetry Review Perillo is the only poet to have won both the Kate Tufts Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award The biography is of interest: Perillo was a park ranger in the Cascade Mountains and in her 30s she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Now she is in a wheelchair. Many of her poems candidly deal with how she negotiates the disease.