RIP Lucia Perillo (1958–2016)

Yesterday, we heard the very sad news of the death of Lucia Perillo. Jacket Copy reports on her passing on October 16th at the age of 58. Michael Schaub writes:

Lucia Perillo, a poet known for her sense of humor and her writing about living with multiple sclerosis, died on Oct. 16 at the age of 58 in Olympia, Wash., her publisher Copper Canyon Press confirms. Her most recent book, “Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones,” was published in February.

In 2000, she received a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship. The MacArthur Foundation praised her "signature voice … marked by an urban speed and a narrative style driven by characterization and drama" and her "emotionally rich and powerful poems."

Perillo was born in 1958, and was raised near New York City. She earned a bachelor's degree in wildlife management from McGill University in Montreal in 1979, later working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

She lived in California in the early 1980s, working at the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge and taking poetry classes from Robert Hass at San Jose State University.

Perillo was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her collection "Inseminating the Elephant." Her 2005 collection "Luck Is Luck" was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Perillo published three poems and one translation in the pages of Poetry. In the final two stanzas of "The Second Slaughter," published in the September 2009 issue, Perillo displayed her abiding concern for animals, the natural world, and our environment:

When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once

I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving
      animals
my first lament. So now I guard
my inhumanity like the jackal
who appears behind the army base at dusk,
come there for scraps with his head lowered
in a posture that looks like appeasement,
though it is not.

In 2008, Perillo was a guest blogger for Harriet, contributing 13 posts that evince her unique intelligence, concern for nature, humor, and insight into the landscape of contemporary poetry. Read on here. And be sure to delve into Maria McLeod's 2009 interview with Perrillo, "The Body Mutiny."