Lucia Perillo

Thursday, February 25, 2010

“The Writer’s Story,” 3:30PM, Garfield Book Company
Reading, 5:30PM, Scandinavian Cultural Center


Lucia Perillo’s fifth book of poems, Inseminating the Elephant, was just published by Copper Canyon Press, and her book of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing, is now out in paperback from Trinity University Press.  A 2000 MacArthur Foundation fellow, her books have received many awards, including the Kingsley-Tufts award for her last book Luck is Luck, which also was a finalist for the L.A. Times prize.  Her work has appeared widely and has been reprinted in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies.  She lives in Olympia.



On the Chehalis River


All day long the sun is busy, going up and going down,
and the moon is busy, swinging the lasso of its gravity.
And the clouds are busy, metamorphing as they skid—
the vultures are busy, circling in their kettle.


And the river is busy filling up my britches
as I sit meditating in the shallows until my legs go numb.
Upstream I saw salmon arching half into the air:
glossy slabs of muscle I first thought were seals.


They roiled in a deeper pocket of the river,
snagged in a drift net on Indian land.
Trying to leap free before relenting to the net
with a whack of final protest from the battered tail.