On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

by Lucia Perillo

Honored as one of the "100 Notable Books of 2012" by The New York Times Book 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."—New York Times Book Review


"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."—Publishers Weekly, starred review


"Perillo's poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake, she pulls readers into the beat and whirl of her slyly devastating descriptions."—Booklist

"Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo. She writes accessible, often funny poems that border on the profane."—Time Out New York

"Lucia Perillo's much lauded writing has been consistently fine—with its deep, fearless intelligence; its dark and delicious wit; its skillful lyricism; and its refreshingly cool but no less embracing humanity." —Open Books: A Poem Emporium


The poetry of Lucia Perillo is fierce, tragicomic, and contrarian, with subjects ranging from coyotes and Scotch broom to local elections and family history. Formally braided, Perillo gathers strands of the mythic and mundane, of media and daily life, as she faces the treachery of illness and draws readers into poems rich in image and story.When you spend many hours alone in a room
you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—
this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal
but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us
do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,
from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit
a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,
who walked four days into the jungle
and stayed for the kindness of the tribe—
who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?

Lucia Perillo's Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the Bobbitt award from the Library of Congress. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

Genres: Poetry, School

96 pages, Hardcover

First published April 10, 2012

About the author

Lucia Perillo published five books of poetry. Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management and subsequently worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her M.A. in English at Syracuse University, and taught at Saint Martin's College, and in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. Her work appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Kenyon Review. Luck Is Luck was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. A former MacArthur fellow, Perillo lived in Olympia, Washington with her husband.

Reviews

[Amelia]

These are really great poems. But I don't rate them, because as much as I enjoyed them and especially the tone of this collection, a lot of it went over my head, because English is not my first language. I have no problems to read novels or even non-fiction in English, but poetry is very special. I always recognise that I connect very different to poems if I read them in German.

[amanda abel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucia Perillo is someone I discovered through her essays first, particularly I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing. That collection was huge for me to find at 31 when I was working on my MFA thesis and delving into works by other chronically ill writers. Perillo had more well years than I did, and yet reading her stories of life in nature reminded me of the days when I was able to go for hikes and be in the world unimpeded by my own physical limitations. Still, her illness (MS) took a heavy toll on her, and reading her words across the years demonstrated her evolving relationship with her body and the death she knew would reach her eventually.

In this, her second to last published collection of poems, she grapples with what it means to be in a body, how our human bodies exist in relationship to the animal and natural world, what life can be measured in, and how long we all have to live in health and peace: “wait / long enough and the world caves in,” but even when it does, you can still “[sit], as I do, in the shallows of the lake / where sixty thousand damselflies / were being made a half-inch from my heart.” Lucia Perillo sadly passed away in 2016, but left behind a sizeable and rich body of work that I recommend to anyone who loves nature, is fascinated by humans, or who is trying to reckon with living in a body or what it means to be disabled or chronically ill.

[Renee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perillo writes in a style that is so unlike what I normally read and write. But she is so shockingly perceptive and good at observation, striking imagery, and parentheticals and asides. And she is funny, so funny that I paused many times to laugh.

I am heartbroken to discover that she died only four years after the publication of On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths at the age of 58, and that this is the last collection of poetry that she was able to give to the world.

I give this collection three stars only because there is so much depth that I feel I haven't fully grasped. This is a book I will need to read numerous times.

[Maryfrances · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucia Perillo's books are always stunning from the subjects she writes about to the perspective she takes about her subject. On the Specturm of Possible Deaths is not my favorite of her books, so that's why I only gave it four stars instead of five, but her work is outstanding and makes her one of the best contemporary poets around, but we won't be seeing more of her work since her unfortunate death from MS.

[Norm Jenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry

Lucia’s poems answer the question, why poetry. Thirteen more words required 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13.

[atito · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow these are stunners / eyes welled up a few times. to look up at the movie screen like a bean sprout... metaphor game ended me

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5

[Scribd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Lucia Perillo’s sixth collection of poems offers little comfort to the optimistic, if you’ve ever been crippled by choice in a department store or experienced an existential crisis reading the comments section of a website, there is some catharsis to be found in these pages. These poems perfectly capture the pervasive unease of life under late capitalism. In “My Father Kept the TV On,” she laments the “…green republic where the pilgrims came to land!” and proclaims, “If I’m going to choose my nostalgia it is a no-brainer/that I’m going to side with books, with the days/before the lithium-ion battery…”

Perillo imagines suburban denizens “swaying to the music of cash registers in the distance” and shares the sensation of manufactured majesty induced by a visit to a home improvement superstore: “You know/you should feel like Walt Whitman, celebrating/everything, but instead you feel like Pope Julius II/commanding Michelangelo to carve forty statues for his tomb.”

In these poems, the Earth, however neglected, still manages to be both beautiful and terrifying, “glowing so lit-up’dly” from space where one cannot see the junk that fills our oceans and our homes, where far below we are “Queasy from our spinning but still holding on,/with no idea we are so brightly shining.”

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've admitted this before...I usually order poetry books to look for single poems to share as prompts. Every once in a while (Pitch by Todd Boss) a collection comes along that I know I will have to read every single poem in order. Since I'd just finished reading Perillo's short stories (Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain) my expectations were high. And completely met. Perillo's way of looking at the world fascinates me. I can always understand at least one theme in each poem, additional strands are wasted on me. In one poem I had to look up the words samara, annealed and phloem. (But I loved it even before I understood it even halfway more). Even as I had the book in my hands I read that it had just received a Washington Book Award for poetry. I held it even tighter (and didn't even return it to the library on time). Blending biology, imagery and humor Perillo transform the natural world, transformed now into a seed with a wing, like the one I wore on the tip of my nose/back when I was green. (from Samara).

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading Perillo since Dangerous Life. Her signature humor, specificity, natural/biological subject matter, and storytelling are all present in this volume just as they were in her earlier books. I am partial to the poems in which her father makes an appearance (My Father Kept the TV On, 300D, Matins), but my favorite poem in this collection is Wild Birds Unlimited for its humor and instruction. My favorite metaphor? The wonderful morphing in Maypole, wherein the birds are church women in hats, girls on a joyride, carnies who erect the Ferris wheel, and Russian sailors. My favorite simile? The explosions from Stargazer:

lily number two goes off like a bottle rocket...

/

...there's one pod yet to detonate

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perillo's poetry loses points for me because her style often feels prosaic, and some of the poems feel too loose and too choppy. But overall, I enjoyed this collection a lot: Perillo writes about nature in an imaginative and fresh way: showing how nature exists on the boundaries of our cities, how pollution and natural beauty exist side by side, and the inevitability of decay and death. Her poems are morbid but never maudlin: death and illness are part of our lives, and exist in her poetry within the wilderness.

[Philip Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucia work is a given favorite for me. However, this new collection really plucked at me in about 17.625 places. You know when you read a poem that speaks to you and you just are in awe and you ask yourself how that poet made that move, or created that shape? When I read this, 5 times in the last 3 weeks, I was in awe and in a place of cohabitation with her poems, but I never needed to ask How. I just kept going back for the resonance, without question.

[Patti K · Rating 4 out of 5]

This new collection of poetry is stunning. Her last book was a finalist for
the Pulitzer! She has a fierce wit and sense of humor. Her ranging interests
and keen eye provide exquisite portraits of the natural and ordinary world.
Perillo makes oblique references to the fact that she has MS and deals with
this devastasting illness as best she can. I recommend.

[Rebekah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I don't know how many births it takes to get
reborn as not the flower but the scent."

For the weirder pieces in here that left me scratching my head, they're all worth soldiering through for lines like these. Unexpected things of beauty that emerge unexpectedly and kind of sucker punch you at the same time.

[Steven Tomcavage · Rating 4 out of 5]

"On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths" is an amazing book of poetry, at once both beautiful and devastating. Perillo focuses her poems on chronic illness, living with death, and her knowledge as a naturalist, but she never completely abandons emotion for science. Her poems have so many levels I'm sure I haven't plumbed the depths. Worthy of reading, re-reading, and re-reading again.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't read much poetry, I'll admit, so take this review with a grain of salt.

That being said, I did like it--there were some beautiful turns of phrase, as one would expect; but there weren't as many "gold nuggets of English language" post-its in the book when I finished it as I would have expected there to be.

[tana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will re-read this book of poems often; much like Einstein's Dreams, The Captain's Verses or Letters to A Young Poet. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the voice - both sharply funny and achingly poignant. It was meant for me!

[Caleb Benadum · Rating 3 out of 5]

while enjoyable, I found her humor too contrived and culturally specific, and her insight as well seemed deep but oftentimes ran shallow. While I appreciated some of her poems, notably Pioneer and Matins, the poems in this book did not seem to me to be anything all that special.

[Taffnerd · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have even a passing interest in poetry, try Lucia Perillo; she is warm and funny and smart and sometimes I have to close the book and my eyes and just breathe for a minute before I go back in and reread.

[Kali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perillo emerges through her poems as tough, funny, unafraid of confronting darkness. Her passion for language and words comes through clearly, along with her deep knowledge of botany and natural history. She is a poet of the mundane, and very good at it.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very sad to hear of Lucia Perillo's recent death after a long struggle with MS. I've read and re-read many of the poems in this collection of her work and have loved them for the past few years. I have yet to read any of her other books but now plan to do so.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

A huge talent. As I read and reread the poems I kept (keep) discovering facets. Some of the poems are couched in humor but are doubled edged.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful, beautiful writing. Made me have hope for the future of poetry.

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I don't like to read poetry... :(

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems about relationships, with people, with the environment, with one's self and one's own body. Raw, emotional and well written.

[Lia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seriously the best f*cking book of poetry ever. Wow.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perillo has a masterful sense of rhythm that makes her poetry a delight to read.

[Brian Wasserman · Rating 2 out of 5]

bad similes, bad stories.. the author wants to constantly remind readers that they are well read and are able to rattle off famous names and details

bad simile, 'second slaughter', "drags it behind his chariot like the cans trail a bride and groom"

in all this is the kind of cute poetry that attracts flies to select poetry readings