On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

Starred review from March 26, 2012
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. She muses, in one grimly amusing poem, on “those who have drifted through thus far of their allotted/ fifty or seventy or ninety years on Earth/ with no disasters happening,” using poetry as a way to “meditate against my envy/ aimed at those who drift inside the bubble of no trouble.” But Perillo isn’t petty; for her, despite the joking tone, the stakes are always high. The book is full of practical advice, including instructions on “The freak-out” which “wants wide open space,/ though the rules call for containment—// there are the genuine police to be considered/ which is why I recommend the empty vestibule.” It’s also full of a kind of transcendent resolve only harsh experience can bring: “no matter what has happened since,/... / the sadness of the bound-to-happen/ the ecstasy of the fragile moment,/ I know one night I narrowed my gaze/ and attended to my captaining, while the sea/ gave me more serious work than either love or speech.”

March 15, 2012

Perillo doesn't like to look backward, or so she said in a recent interview. But most of the poems in her latest book do just that. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for Inseminating the Elephant (2009), which featured poems about her coping with multiple sclerosis, Perillo here muses on everything from her elementary school years to her father's books, "scattered face down like turtles sunning," to a photograph of her grandfather circa 1915 "while his words turn into coal." Fueled by anger, the poems make an effort (sometimes too deliberate) to avoid mawkishness at all costs. The result is steel-wrought poetry whose metaphors are honed with precision, as in the final lines of one of the best: "Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting/ your robe into a noose knot, when you stopped/ fighting the urge to howl, and howled--/ and did it bring relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?" VERDICT While not bitter, these dark, hard-edged, sarcastic poems offer anything but emotion recollected in tranquility. They're written from the gut.--Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., Lutherville, MD

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2012
Perillo is a master of fast-moving, long-lined, seemingly casual yet tough and exacting poems. In her sixth collection, this Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Library of Congress' Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Award stealthily combines earthy intimacy, wry deprecation, metaphysics, and acute observations expressed in exuberant yet piercing images. In their headlong, ambushing whirl, these bat-out-of-hell poems gather moments ludicrous, grim, and sublime. We see Achilles in the thick of his grief-fueled bloodbath and birds mired in oil. Perillo's abiding empathy for all living things underlies her contemplation of a coyote perching on a dumpster, a field of invasive yet glorious scotch broom destined to be devoured by a backhoe, and the great Trash Vortex of plastic poisoning the Pacific. A caustic critic of the body, not that it is mortal / but that it is mortifying, she ruefully considers unforeseen forms of death. Cued to the ecstasy of the fragile moment and the dangerous elation of the world, Perillo is skeptical of remedies and dazzled by the jubilation of life. Watch for her first short story collection in May.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)