On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

Lucia Perillo

The poems in Pulitzer Prize finalist Lucia Perillo’s sixth book, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths, swerve and leap and run with the possibility that our final slip on the banana peel will be a giddy ride into the wild blue yonder, even as they acknowledge that this prospect is willfully naive. With subjects that range across history, from epic heroes of ancient Greece, to the beach at Normandy, to the petty competition between an invasive plant species and a strip mall, Perillo’s poems are formally braided while gathering strands of the mythic and mundane. Regarding Lucia Perillo’s poetry, Time Out New York wrote, “Whoever told you poetry isn’t for everyone hasn’t read Lucia Perillo.”

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ISBN: 9781556594151

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9781556593970

Format: Hardcover

My Father Kept the TV On

while the books lay open, scattered face down

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 Courier

font rendition of the decimal system

under the wrapper, hazy like fog

taped to the book, the tape’s yellow orange-almost

(depending on how old) reinforced with threads.

Meanwhile his eyes drifted back and forth

back and forth until the book slid to the floor.

The flag then. Then snow. Or the corporate logo

of the eye—all night the night would watch him,

plural, them. Just ask my friend whose father

was a drunk, a highball glass on the nightstand and a swizzle

stick to mark his place. Still, on Thursday nights

he stumbled down to the reading room

to leaf through the new arrivals.

 

Oh green republic where the pilgrims came to land!

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, but after

Philip Roth and John le Carré were born, books not too

highbrow or too low, but sometimes thick

and overdue. Books the fathers read to escape us

who were the shackles that the plodding days

latched on to them who’d started out their lives with war, so this

was perfect, courting danger in their underwear,

feeling the breast of the vixen stiffen,

slipping their hands into the thief’s black glove.

About the Author

Lucia Perillo grew up in the suburbs of New York City in the 1960s. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management and subsequently worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her MA in English at Syracuse University while working seasonally at Mount Rainier National Park, and moved to Olympia, WA,  in 1987, where she taught at Saint Martin’s University. For most of the 1990s, Perillo taught in the creative …

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Reviews

Honored as a “Top 10 Poetry Book” by Publishers Weekly

Selected for the “100 Notable Books of 2012” list by New York Times Book Review

“Perillo has long lived with, and written about, her struggle with debilitating multiple sclerosis. Her bracing sixth book of poems, published concurrently with her debut story collection, takes an unflinching, though not unsmiling, look at mortality. Perillo has a penchant for dark humor, for jokes that stick… [and] despite the joking tone, the stakes are always high.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The poems in On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths are taut, lucid, lyric, filled with complex emotional reflection while avoiding the usual difficulties of highbrow poetry.” —New York Times Book Review

Reading this book “is like listening to a gifted conversationalist: Perillo has a polished way of musing about our world—the micro and the macro—that engages and delights, and is more often than not a lot of fun to read.” —Alex M. Frankel, Antioch Review

“‘Tragedy’s easy, comedy’s hard,’ says the actors’ cliché. Lucia Perillo tries to accomplish both, not only within the same books—On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths is her sixth—but within the same lines. Her poems’ gleeful conjunctions of scenes and weird words insist on the high spirits available in contemporary life, and their angular syntax makes for wild rides; at the same time, those rides, those words, those spirits, all point to the same melancholy end.” —Stephen Burt, The Nation

“Lucia Perillo… examines her life more broadly in the viscerally dark and edgy On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths.” —Library Journal