Body Mutinies - by Lucia Perillo (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Lucia Perillo's poems race flat out. Perillo knows where the accelerator is and what it's for, and she stands on it, puts her whole weight on it. These dazzling and powerful poems hold nothing back. The poet commits herself wholeheartedly to the passions, pleasures, and griefs of a body that is dying and subject to all the violations of a violent world. And when the poems veer almost out of control, she knows how to steer 'into the fishtails' and she knows that 'when everything goes to hell the worst you can do / is hit the brake'"