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agate
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Joined: 17 May 2006
Posts: 5694
Location: Oregon
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 Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2012 11:02 pm Post subject: A writer with MS--Lucia Perillo |
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I haven't read any of Lucia Perillo's books but she has MS and two of her books were recently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review (May 18, 2012):
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Silver Linings
Poems and Stories by Lucia Perillo
ON THE SPECTRUM OF POSSIBLE DEATHS
By Lucia Perillo
81 pp. Copper Canyon Press. $22.
HAPPINESS IS A CHEMICAL IN THE BRAIN
Stories
By Lucia Perillo
211 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $23.95.
By ADAM PLUNKETT
On the cover of “Inseminating the Elephant,” Lucia Perillo’s 2009 book of poems, minimal brush strokes form what look like four legs and one red trunk with the overlapping color patterns of Cézanne and a few dribbled lines of a Pollock. The painter is in fact Jojo the elephant, “a sweet-tempered, tuskless bull” who had been painting for 11 years at the time of the book’s publication. He also plays harmonica in the Thai Elephant Orchestra.
Jojo’s example encourages as it disarms. Nature is more creative than we had imagined — an elephant can make art! — but the human imagination is less distinctive than we had presumed, since art is something even an elephant can make. This note of hopeful disillusionment marks much of Perillo’s poetry, a limber body of work that for 20-odd years has celebrated the world that often hurts her. With bleak whimsy and sweet sadness Perillo offers what perspective she can on a life that sent her as a young woman from a ranger station to a wheelchair as a result of multiple sclerosis. To read Perillo is to learn that her hopefulness is not a matter of luck or of temperament but is fought for, tooth and claw.
In the title poem of that earlier collection, we learn that some zoologists wear “bicycle helmets and protective rubber suits” to inseminate elephants. But the humor turns provocative when Perillo admits that she is herself the elephant in the operating room: “Are you brave enough to side with laughter / if I face my purplish, raw reflection / and attempt the difficult entry of that chamber . . . ?” (Oh, Lucia, no, my laugh was at the zoologists’ wielding a “giant rectal thermometer.”) Perillo sometimes takes out her frustrations on her readers so they feel the emotions she struggles with — the pain, shame, jealousy, grief and resentment that collectively dispel the myth that the afflicted are more kindly or peaceful or spiritually sound for being physically compromised. “Sunrise,” she has written in an essay, “often makes me scream, what with the very idea of another day” spent inside her body. “You will never be happy,” she writes to herself.
The joke is hardly ever on the reader of Perillo’s new book of poems, “On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths.” “It is easy,” she admits — easy if not right — “to feel possessed of a soul that’s better schooled / than the fluffy cloud inside” the unwounded people she envies, easy to feel superior as a defense mechanism. Her meditation needs no biography or passive aggressiveness; she has only to “Grrrr,” because the self-reflection of “Spectrum” presumes the self-revealing parts of her earlier poems and personal essays. We know that Perillo sits “in the shallows of the lake” because she can neither walk nor swim to watch the birds. We know that her poem “Bats” is what her essays call a “knowledge game,” a meditative exercise that salvages optimism from sadness and unfulfilled spiritual wishes. The sheer joy of her descriptive precision, and the liquid consistency of the edges between watching and wishing, make the knowledge game a small parallel world that absorbs ours in its contentment even though Perillo comes to reject her hope that she “could slip quite easily from existing.”
...
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. But there are none of the extensive, often narrative poems of Perillo’s earlier work — perhaps because she has been devoting her narrative attention to her first book of fiction, the story collection “Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain.” Set in a sad, semirural town in the Pacific Northwest, these stories follow characters with no clear relation to one another but a reasonably clear relation to Perillo herself, who lives in Olympia, Wash. Three stories feature a woman with Down syndrome whose sister has a Perillo-like penchant for bad boys. Other characters echo other versions of her history — youthful work outdoors, attenuated feminism, a marriage between a woman in a wheelchair and a man in good health — and many of her conflicts are represented here too: envy, resentment, despair. ...
With some exceptions, “Happiness” is full of straightforward sentences in straightforward narratives, as you might expect from someone who understands the mechanics of storytelling but hasn’t yet written much fiction. ...Some characters have a bizarre lack of empathy or ambition or at least self-awareness that all hint at a very bright author unsure of how to dumb herself down.
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Adam Plunkett has written for The New Republic, n+1 and other publications.
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