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    I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature
    I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature
    I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature
    Ebook219 pages17 hours

    I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature

    By Lucia Perillo

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Acclaimed poet and MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Lucia Perillo, a former park ranger who loved to hike the Cascade Mountains alone and prided herself on daring solo skis down the wild slopes of Mount Rainier, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was in her thirties. I've Heard the Vultures Singing is a clear-eyed and brazenly outspoken examination of her life as a person with disabilities. In unwavering and witty prose, and without a trace of self-pity, she contemplates the bitter ironies of being unable to walk, what it’s like to experience eros as a sick person, how to lower one’s expectations for a wilderness experience, and how to deal with the vagaries of a disease that has no predictable trajectory. Masterfully written, the essays resonate with lovers of literature and nature, and with anyone who has dealt with disadvantages of the body or the hard-luck limitations of ordinary life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrinity University Press
    Release dateApr 14, 2011
    ISBN9781595340924
    I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature
    Author

    Lucia Perillo

    Lucia Perillo (1958-2016) is the author of many collections of poetry: Dangerous Life, which won the Norma Farber Award for best first book; The Body Mutinies, which received the PEN Revson Foundation Fellowship and the Kate Tufts Poetry Award; The Oldest Map with the Name America; Luck Is Luck, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Inseminating the Elephant and On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths. Perillo’s poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and other magazines, and have been included in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart anthologies. She received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2000. She has taught at Syracuse University, Saint Martin’s University, and Southern Illinois University.

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    • 5/5
      A searing book about illness. A must read for anyone interested in illness as a metaphor.
    • 4/5
      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.

    Book preview

    I've Heard the Vultures Singing - Lucia Perillo

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