Inseminating the Elephant [is] a collection of poems, often laced with humor, that examines popular culture, the limits of the human body, and the tragicomic aspects of everyday experience.--Pulitzer Prize finalist citation

These poems are tough and witty.--The New Yorker

Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo.--Time Out New York

A 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Inseminating the Elephant delivers hard-edged yet vulnerable poems that reconcile the comic impulse with the complications and tragedies of living in the eating and breathing body--what Lucia Perillo calls the meat cage. Perillo dissects human failings and sexuality, as well as collisions between nature and the manufactured world, to create an unforgettable poetic vision.

How the zoologists start
is by facing the mirror of her flanks,
that foreboding luscious place where the gray hide
gives way to a zeroing-in of skin as vulnerable as an orchid.
Which is the place to enter, provided you are brave,
brave enough to insert your laser-guided camera
to avoid the two false openings of her vestibule,
much like the way of entering death, of giving birth to death,
calling it forth as described in the Tibetan Book.

Lucia Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal and worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her MA in English at Syracuse University, and has published five books of poetry. She was a MacArthur Fellow in 2000 and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

The poems in The Body Mutinies bring speech to those accomplishments of the body that are most often relegated to silence, though in Perillo's usage accomplishments may include illness, death, and certainly sex. Her textual landscape includes rock climbers and the ill, female killers who take to the road and women who survive by climbing out of burning buildings, even though in the process they're forced to let modesty fly to the wind. In poems that are at once colloquial and elegant, Perillo strives to bridge the gap between the exuberant voice of the streets and the rarefied voice of literary tradition. Using the long lines and narrative style that have been identified with some of the finest male poets of our times, Perillo tells the stories of female experience with a grim eye for the comic and an ear turned to language's highest pitch.

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.

A New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year selection; Publishers Weekly Top 10 Poetry Book of the Year; winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for Poetry; and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Perillo has long lived with, and written about, her struggle with debilitating multiple sclerosis. Her bracing sixth book of poems takes an unflinching, though not unsmiling, look at mortality.--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.--The New York Times Book Review

From Victor the Shaman

I feel the need for more humanitybecause the winter wren is not enough, even with its complicated music emanating

from the brambles. So I relent to my friendwho keeps bugging me to see her shaman, tutored by the Indians who live at the base

of Monte Albán. Tutored also by the heavy bagat Sonny's Gym: Box like heaven / Fight like hellhis T-shirt says; the graphic shows an angel's fist

buried to the wrist in Satan's brisket, while the princeof dark jabs the angel's kisser . . .

Lucia Perillo grew up in the suburbs of New York City in the 1960s. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal, completed her MA in English at Syracuse University, and for most of the 1990s she taught in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. She currently resides in Olympia, Washington.

Honored as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012 by The New York Times Book 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

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.--Publishers Weekly, starred review

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

Lucia Perillo's much lauded writing has been consistently fine--with its deep, fearless intelligence; its dark and delicious wit; its skillful lyricism; and its refreshingly cool but no less embracing humanity. --Open Books: A Poem Emporium

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.

A starred review in Publishers Weekly called Lucia Perillo's new book a marvelous collection.

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.--Booklist

For a poet obsessed with the steady degradation of the body and looming of death, Lucia Perillo manages to be highly entertaining.... Humor is actually the key to the power of her poems.--The Los Angeles Times

The poems [are] taut, lucid, lyric, filled with complex emotional reflection while avoiding the usual difficulties of highbrow poetry.--The New York Times Book Review

Lucia Perillo's Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: New and Selected Poems is a significant retrospective that includes work from her six previous books... Fans will recognize her signature style--accessible, attuned to the small dramas in people's lives, and at times witheringly funny. They will also find familiar themes: the delights of nature, the frailty of the physical world and the many ways the human body lets people down. The book shows Perillo's ability to balance the timely and the timeless, and to capture some of the struggles that all humans face, regardless of when or where they live.--Washington Post

Perillo writes skillfully of urban, suburban, and wild environments, but she's nearly unparalleled when addressing the 'meat cage, ' and its pain and mortality. Perillo's poems move against the backdrop of her own struggle with multiple sclerosis: 'If I sleep on my belly, pinning it down, / my breasts start puling like baby pigs/ trapped under their slab of torpid mother.' Yet these vivacious poems reveal humor, sexuality, and a sharp sense of images and turns of phrase....[a] marvelous collection.--Publishers Weekly, starred review

Lucia Perillo writes poignant, smart, very engaging poems.... She has a vast storehouse of sometimes arcane knowledge to call upon, and that her palpable knowledge of the mortality of all things gives her work a primal power. [S]he has a fine sense of humor, sometimes deliciously caustic and sometimes delightfully silly.... What a welcome publication!--Open Books: A Poem Emporium

MacArthur Genius Award winner Lucia Perillo is a fearless poet who, with characteristic humor and incisive irony, confronts the failings and wonder of nature, particularly the frail and resilient human body. This generous collection draws upon five previous volumes, including books selected as a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year and as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

From Again, the Body

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?...

Lucia Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal 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, and has published eight books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She was a MacArthur Fellow and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

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.--Booklist

The poems are] taut, lucid, lyric, filled with complex emotional reflection while avoiding the usual difficulties of highbrow poetry.--The New York Times Book Review

MacArthur Genius Award winner Lucia Perillo is a fearless poet who, with characteristic humor and incisive irony, confronts the failings and wonder of nature, particularly the frail and resilient human body. This generous collection draws upon five previous volumes, including books selected as a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year and as a finalist for the Pulitzer prize.

From Again, the Body

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?...

Lucia Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal 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, and has published eight books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She was a MacArthur Fellow and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo's story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them and are surprised when the world comes roaring back.

An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter's badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who serves as an accomplice to her younger sister's sexual exploits and her aging mother's fantasies of revenge.

Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we draw the boundaries between these two zones. What's funny, what's heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?

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 and observations before they can catch their breath...The fluid grace of Perillo's irresistible lines belies the tension inherent in their outlook, the resistance to easy emotion and obvious sentiment, the rejection of self-pity in favor of flinty humor and rigor. Sheer, shivery pleasure to read, Perillo's poems have extensive appeal.--Donna Seaman, Booklist

Perillo's time as a wildlife researcher gives her insight into the workings of a turtle's heart and blackbird behavior, while other topics range from Viagra and video games to Transcendentalism... These poems are tough and witty.--The New Yorker

Lucia Perillo's poems cannot be ignored or forgotten... In imagery as startlingly original as Anne Sexton's and in philosophical tone as harsh and courageous as Adrienne Rich's, Perillo creates poems of great energy and power.--Choice

Perillo is never uninteresting.--Publishers Weekly, starred review

Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo. She writes accessible, often funny poems that border on the profane... Perillo is always after something deeper than mere self-deprecation: if not transcendence, then a kind of knowledge that only comes the hard way... f you're seeking levity in the face of life's hardships, Perillo's poems can show you how to find it.--Time Out New York

Lucia Perillo's hard-edged yet vulnerable poems attempt to reconcile the comic impulse--the humorous deflection of anxiety--with the complications and tragedies of living in a mortal, fragile meat cage. Perillo's surgical honesty--and biting, nourishing humor--chronicle human failings, sexuality, and the collision of nature with the manufactured world. Whether recalling her former career as a naturalist experimenting on white rats or watching birds from her wheelchair, she draws the reader into unforgettable places rich in image and story.

Don't look up, because the ceiling is suffering
some serious violations of the electrical code,
the whole chaotic kelplike mess
about to shower us with flames . . .
Here, take a seat on these rickety risers
inside my head, though your life isn't mine,
still, I have hope for your hearing
the gist of this refrain
about how glad he is that he's not dead.

MacArthur Fellow Lucia Perillo is the author of four books of poetry that have won the Norma Farber First Book Award, the Kate Tufts Prize, the Balcones Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her critically acclaimed memoir, I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature, was published in 2007.