On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

By Lucia Perillo

"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 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781619320260

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.

Book preview

The Second Slaughter

Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse

behind the heels and drags it

behind his chariot like the cans that trail

a bride and groom. Then he lays out

a banquet for his men, oxen and goats

and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat

until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—

in the morning more animals must be killed

for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds

no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;

not even heaving four stallions on the pyre

can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

And here I turn my back on the epic hero— the one who slits

the throats of his friend’s dogs,

killing what the loved one loved

to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent

by vanishing from my concern

after he throws the dogs onto the fire.

The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep

until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially

which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets

and tails like peacocks, covered in tar

weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows

at the rim of the marsh. But once

I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals

my first lament. So now I guard

my inhumanity like the jackal

who appears behind the army base at dusk,

come there for scraps with his head lowered

in a posture that looks like appeasement

though it is not.

Again, the Body

I have become what I have always been and it has taken a lifetime, all of my own life, to reach this point where it is as if I know finally that I am alive and that I am here, right now.

TOBIAS SCHNEEBAUM, Keep the River on Your Right

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?

This could be any life: the vegetation is thick

and when there is an opening, you follow

down its tunnel until one night you find yourself

walking as on any night, though of a sudden your beloved

friends are using their stone blades

to split the skulls of other men. Gore everywhere,

though the chunk I ate was bland;

it was only when I chewed too far and bled

that the taste turned satisfyingly salty.

How difficult to be in a body,

how easy to be repelled by it,

eating one-sixth of the human heart.

Afterward, the hunters rested

their heads on one another’s thighs

while the moon shined on the river

for the time it took to cross the narrow sky

making its gash through the trees…

My Father Kept the TV On

while the books lay open, scattered facedown

like turtles sunning, the jackets hunched, with a little

hump in the hunch from the trough of the spine,

bearing a white sticker with the typewriter’s

Reviews for On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

[sbloom42 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"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.

[kali.lightfoot · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Perillo emerges through her poems as tough, funny, unafraid of confronting darkness. Her passion for language and words comes through clearly, along with her deep knowledge of botany and natural history. She is a poet of the mundane, and very good at it.

[woolgathering · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.”