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.
