Lucia Perillo (1958–2016) published numerous books of poetry, including Luck Is Luck, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, Inseminating the Elephant, a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths, on the New York Times’s list of “100 Notable Books of 2012”; and On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). Perillo taught at Syracuse University, Saint Martin’s University, and Southern Illinois University.

Again, the Body

by Lucia Perillo
I have become what I have always been and it
has taken a lifetime, all of my own life, to reach
this point where it is as if I know finally that I
am alive and that I am here, right now.

    —Tobias Schneebaum, Keep the River on Your Right


When you spend many hours alone in a room
you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—
this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal

People on couch
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