Lucia Perillo – författare

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.

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?