Lucia Perillo’s sixth book of poems, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon 2012) was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award.
Poetry
Winter 1999
Short Course in Semiotics
1. “Naked woman surrounded by police”: that’s one way to start the poem. But would she mean anything devoid of her context, in this case a lushly late-August deciduous forest, […]
Poetry
Winter 1999
The Odds
In his poem it’s not yet daylight and the young man’s mom is headed south when suddenly out of the dawn-broth a horse appears in the road too close for […]
Poetry
Summer 1993
Women Who Sleep on Stones
Women who sleep on stones are like brick houses that squat alone in cornfields. They look weatherworn, solid, dusty, torn screens sloughing from the window frames. But at dusk a […]
Poetry
Summer 1993
On the Sunken Fish Processor, Tenyo Maru
Just as we pray that the Tenyo Maru keeps its hull intact as it yaws and rocks the ocean floor off Cape Flattery, a quarter million barrels of crude oil […]
Poetry
Summer 1993
Retablo with Multiple Sclerosis and Saint
for Vivian Kendall Diseased women always paint self-portraits. That’s one way of stopping time, I guess— banking pennies against what the receding days will duck out with underneath their skirts. […]
The Kenyon Review Credos
World and Word
The Kenyon Review Credos In my graduate school, in the nineteen-eighties, frequently floated forth was the idea that language precedes reality—I think what that meant was I had—had to have—the […]
Winter 2012
Wild Birds Unlimited
Because the old feeder feeds nothing
but squirrels, who are crafty and have learned
how to hang so it swings sideways until
gravity takes the seed—I bumble down