Summary

Lucia Perillo's poetry embodies a sensibility at once personal and national. Many of her poems are candid and affecting--some document how she negotiates life with multiple sclerosis; others concern her working-class Catholic childhood in a small Hudson River town. But in general, and even in these personal works, her poetry picks up the fragments of American culture--Bart Simpson, crimes of violence, Girl Scouting, teen rebellion, redneck survivalists--and assembles them into a highly readable and illuminating cultural commentary. One poem, "Foley," blends the subjects of movie sound effects and phone sex to make the point that in electronic America things are seldom as they seem--or sound. In "For I Have Taught the Japanese," an ESL instructor confesses, "I was such/an idiot I even tried to apologize more than once/for Nagasaki." In a third, Perillo thumbs through a survivalist magazine to see what it has to offer to her newborn nephew: "They're hawking a T-shirt: I entered the world/fat, mad, and bald, and I plan on leaving that way." The texture of Lucia Perillo's writing is conversational, poignant, often mordantly funny. The structure of her work is architectural in its grandeur, dramatic in its impact. Taken together, the poems inThe Oldest Map with the Name Americapresent the reader with an important new way of looking at the world--a vision that in its coherence provides us with a deep and original understanding of what we're all about, as individuals and as a culture.

Author Biography

Lucia Perillo has published two previous collections: The Body Mutinies,for which she won the PEN/Revson Foundation Poetry Fellowship and several other awards, and Dangerous Life, which received the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and The Kenyon Review, and they have been included in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies. A former park ranger, she now teaches at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

PART ONE From Dangerous Life (1989)

(16)

The Sweaters

(2)

Landfill

(2)

The News (A Manifesto)

(2)

Dangerous Life

(2)

First Job/Seventeen

(2)

The Northside at Seven

(2)

The Revelation

(4)

PART TWO From The Body Mutinies (1996)

(38)

How Western Underwear Came to Japan

(1)

Skin

(2)

The Body Mutinies

(1)

Kilned

(2)

On Belay

(2)

Thinking about Illness

(1)

Women Who Sleep on Stones

(2)

Limits

(5)

"What One Loves Are Things That Fade"

(2)

Annunciation at a Foreign Film

(2)

Tripe

(2)

Compulsory Travel

(2)

The Roots of Pessimism

(2)

Monorail

(2)

Needles

(4)

Cairn for Future Travel

(1)

The Body Rising

(5)

PART THREE New Poems

(86)

Beige Trash

(3)

Foley

(5)

Trees

(2)

Air Guitar

(3)

Self-Portrait in Two Ages

(2)

Apollo

(3)

The Golden Lotus

(2)

Pomegranate

(3)

Long Time Too Long

(1)

Short Course in Semiotics

(3)

For Edward Hopper, from the Floor

(2)

For I Have Taught the Japanese

(2)

Pigeons

(3)

The Sportsmen's Guide

(2)

Serotonin

(3)

Lament in Good Weather

(1)

Brief Life Among the Immortals

(2)

Palimpsest

(3)

A Readymade

102

(2)

Abandon

104

(4)

Tilapia

108

(3)

In Light of the Absent Constant

111

(2)

The Sutro Baths

113

(4)

In the Long Shadow of Pierre de Fermat

117

(2)

The Oldest Map with the Name America

119

(8)

La Vie en Rose

127

(1)

Home

128

(5)

The Salmon Underneath the City

133

(2)

The Ghost Shirt

135

(8)

Notes

143

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Excerpts

The Body Rising

I'd like to do something that would be the opposite of skydiving. Instead of falling I would rise up and up guess I'm talking about flying . . .

-LETTER FROM VIVIAN KENDALL

Think about the girl in her red bikini,
how she rides the air behind the speedboat.
So what if her chest is leashed to a kite-forget the kite.
Think of county-fair daredevils
careering in rickety turrets, their motorbikes
riding the wall at centrifugal speeds. So what
if you paid a dollar admission-forget the dollar,
forget whatever you admitted. Think of all the times
you didn't have to pay to see gravity break:
the circus clown cannon-balled into the sky
and Eva Braun zeppelined into the sky
and the astronauts, especially the astronauts
who never came down when they were turned to vapor.
How to find fault in anything that includes the body rising:
the raft spilling its paddlers, who disappear
so theatrically before they surface in the river's twisted
sheets; the WWII bomber that crashes into the mountain
and stays buried, whose airmen keep floating up
after years in the glacier, limb by perfect limb;

the pillar of smoke rising from the funeral home
run by your neighbors, the monosyllabic
Mills & Burns. For months you've been typing
in a second-story room across the street, oblivious
to what the stories mean-the fact you sit on nothing
more than air, you inhabit the air
just over the oldest bank vault in town, all day
you steep in the waft of silver dollars.
Yet it's not the floor that's important,
not the raft of flowered carpet you think holds everything
up; it's not the kite but the body, not the river
but the body, not the rocket but the body that understands
its elements so well it can revert to them in a blink.
And maybe we serve the body most faithfully
when we abandon it, the way these dancers
(who enter now by way of the TVs local access channel)
allow themselves to rise up on each other's wings.
But these aren't dancers really: they don't have wings.
just death metal punks, speed slammers and moshers
whose choreography's zoned against unbruised escape.
The bass is a wooden shoe clogging
the deepest canal in your car, and teenage boys
have started to launch themselves like supermans
soaring over the crowd of burnished heads.
You're thinking about what odds these boys risk
getting crushed. But look what happens next:
they don't get crushed. Instead they turn
weightless and waterlogged, bullied and buoyed
like ghosts who can't drown because they have no boats.
Vaults of pliant and complete surrender, rising
as each body passes through the pairs of upraised hands.

Self-Portrait in Two Ages

Who is this girl, standing close to the roadway,
flinching in the hard-boiling wake of these trucks?
Okay, it's me-but let's not get nostalgic,
not make this another carousel in Themepark Gone.
Because this girl doesn't want to be me, doesn't want
to be anyone. Even now I carn't make her
take on the ghostware of that first-person past.
What she wants is to ride like a Jonah in strange cars
-east, west, it doesn't matter. She wants
the same river again and again and not stepped in
twice. I know: Heraclitus. Bur don't expect me
to tell her what she wants is that old,
when she thinks it's something that she just invented.
And telling would scold her, like calling her honey,
like the woman who clucks into a chalk-white cup
when she looks outside and sees the girl there-
thumb out, head down, hair gone under a watch cap.
Here: where the highway tilts onto concrete stalks
across from a steamed diner window. Through which
I'm peering as I cluck into my chalk-white cup.
Even from this distance, I'd know anywhere
my own monkey face, and the city,
there in the arcadia of North American French,
where when a man pulls his car from the current of traffic
she'll get in and let his language surge

between them like another river. She's a boat
without oars, without even a name, and the man
steers her into the murky shallows with a word
that might be peau (skin) or peur (fear) or peut-
skin what he could and could not do. When his hand
slides where her jacket buttons leave a space
like a trough between waves, she'll close her eyes
and say nothing. The river changes but the hand
is always the same, the car moving, or stopped,
as when the hand doesn't belong to a stranger.
She can't tell if she likes it. It's just a hand.
And the woman-who watched her get into the car-
memorizes the license plate, then forgets. It's not him,
after all, that the girl's afraid of But of living
past him, passing into the someday when she-gone
matronly, stern-will have her own self to answer to.

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 second-story light is always burning.

Used to be I loved nothing more
than spreading my blanket on high granite ledges
that collect good water in their hollows.
Stars came close without the trees
staring and rustling like damp underthings.

But doesn't the body foil what it loves best?
Now my hips creak and their blades are tender.
I can't rest on my back for fear of exposing
my gut to night creatures who might come along
and rip it open with a beak or hoof

And if I sleep on my belly, pinning it down,
my breasts start puling like baby pigs
trapped under their slab of torpid mother.
Dark passes as I shift from side to side to side,
the blood pooling just above the bone.

Women who sleep on stones don't sleep.
They see the stars moving, the sunrise, the gnats
rising like a hairnet lifted from a waitress's head.
The next day they're sore all over and glad
for the ache: that's how stubborn they are.

Excerpted from The Oldest Map with the Name America by Lucia Perillo
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.