MARBLEHEAD – On Sunday, October 23rd, the Abbot Library’s Poetry Salon will focus on the poetry of Lucia Perillo, a MacArthur Genius Fellow, who crafts poetry that is often blunt, graphic, and written in a strangely graceful matter-of-fact tone that digs into art, nature, and the body as organism.
Perillo was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis right around the time she published her first title, Dangerous Life. The success of the debut, paired with Perillo’s diagnosis, shifted her career track from wildlife management to teaching. In Dangerous Life (1989), Perillo confronts violence through dashing narratives and a direct, precise voice. For The Body Mutinies (1996) she turns her attention inward, using the notion of illness to capture the struggle between body and spirit with conscientious candor, meticulously accurate language, and comic spirit.
In a 2009 interview, Perillo said she wanted her poems to be capable of being read two ways: “You could read them not knowing that I was a person who had an illness, or you could read them with that knowledge and have another reading of the poem.” Perillo’s new book, Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones, pulls together selected poems from her six previous collections, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize–finalist Inseminating the Elephant along with a robust assemblage of new work. Please join Claire Keyes, Marblehead poet and SSU Professor emerita, for a discussion of a poet whose signature voice is marked by an urban speed and a narrative style driven by characterization and drama.
Sunday, October 23rd, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Abbot Public Library / All are welcome: poetry lovers and those looking to explore the form!
The Abbot Public Library is located at 235 Pleasant Street, Marblehead, MA 01945. For additional information, please call 781-631-1481 or visit www.abbotlibrary.org.
