Craft: Lucia Perillo

Lucia Perillo (1958-2016) was a highly praised, but still underrated poet. She often wrote about multiple sclerosis, and the failures of the “meat cage,” or human body. Perillo had the rare capacity to write with humor, but also had unfettered access to a dark well. Her subjects, too, were wide-ranging and showed a powerful imagination: the viciousness of shrikes, big noses, bra sales, Blanche DuBois, tripe, and skin.

Perillo was diagnosed with MS in 1988 when she was 29. She was teaching at Saint Martin’s University in Washington State, and working seasonally for the National Park Service at Mount Rainier. Since around 2001 she lost function of her legs and was in a wheelchair thereafter.

Perillo: “I think it is a dotted line / looping the outskirts of our being human—”

Perillo studied wildlife management, but after attending a lecture by Robert Hass at a community college, she decided to pursue poetry. Her first book, Dangerous Life, was published in 1989.

Perillo favored long, single stanzas that seemed to begin out of nothing and were propelled with enormous energy across and down the page. Her beginnings always push into strangeness and set the reader in the world of the poem. For example:

• Who is to blame for there being no tractors (“Beige Trash”)

• “Naked woman surrounded by police”: that’s one way (“Crash Course in Semiotics”)

• It is Harrison Ford who just saved the world (“Foley”)

• Every night space junk falls from the sky (“On the Destruction of the Mir”)

• The professor stabbed his chest with his hands like curved forks (“Transcendentalism”)

• The women in my family were full of still water (“Air Guitar”)

• Luckily, it’s shallow enough that I can pole my rubber boat— (“Bulletin from Somewhere up the Creek”)