Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: Selected and New Poems

by Lucia Perillo

“Perillo’s poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake.”—Booklist

“The poems [are] taut, lucid, lyric, filled with complex emotional reflection while avoiding the usual difficulties of highbrow poetry.”—The New York Times Book Review

MacArthur Genius Award winner Lucia Perillo is a fearless poet who, with characteristic humor and incisive irony, confronts the failings and wonder of nature, particularly the frail and resilient human body. This generous collection draws upon five previous volumes, including books selected as a New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year” and as a finalist for the Pulitzer prize.

From “Again, the Body”

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
but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us
do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,
from scratching off the juicy scab?...

Lucia Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal with a major in wildlife management, and subsequently worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her MA in English at Syracuse University, and has published eight books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She was a MacArthur Fellow and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

Genres: Poetry

254 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 2015

About the author

Lucia Perillo published five books of poetry. Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management and subsequently worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her M.A. in English at Syracuse University, and taught at Saint Martin's College, and in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. Her work appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Kenyon Review. Luck Is Luck was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. A former MacArthur fellow, Perillo lived in Olympia, Washington with her husband.

Reviews

[Fran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perillo's use of imagery is amazing. Some of the rawness (especially sexial) in some poems made me uncomfortable. Glad I read it.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

American Poetry Review: How do you manage to stay in the moment, not fall into despair?

LP: I've already fallen: this is the voice from the swamp. The trick is to make it interesting. My favorite quote is from Santayana, about life being lyrical in its essence, comic in its occurrence, and tragic in its outcome.

I happened to see Perillo read in Seattle last year, only about half a year before she passed away, sadly. As sometimes happens, it was her death that pushed me to go back and read more of her work, which was a bittersweet gift. She's one of my new favorite writers: sharp, witty, bracing, bleak, but somehow still.....beautiful? No, beautiful doesn't quite cut it. Her writing is human in the best sense, nailing the complexity and ambiguity of life without flinching or wallowing (or, if there is a little wallowing, with self-recognition and tongue firmly in cheek.)

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Day 12 of #TheSealyChallenge 2021 is Time will Clean the Carcass Bones by Lucia Perillo published by Copper Canyon Press.

I want to be Perillo when I grow up! I so admire the searing seeing in her poems. No one. Nothing. Escapes.

Some of my favorite moments:

I had this idea the world did not need men: not that we would have to kill them personally, but through our sustained negligence they would soon die off like houseplants.

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.

Wickatunk, Colts Neck, Zarephath, Spotswood — in every town there were houses, in every house there’s a light.

I was young for a minute, but then I got old.

The women in my family were full of still water; they churned out piecework as quietly as glands.

This is the kind of story you could carry around like a beaded keychain from a tourist trap:

See the leaves falling: isn’t this the trees’ way of telling us to just buck up?

See, nature is angry, I said to myself: Nature is just an ice pick with wings.

Question: how big does a stick have to be to be a club? Answer: at least as big around as a small man’s wrist.

But hey, that’s just me, the truculent me. There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of humans being happy. As the thief says, This will go easier if everyone cooperates.

Many of the great men — Buddha, Saint Augustine, Jefferson, Einstein — had a woman and child they needed to ditch. A little prologue before the great accomplishments could happen.

Perillo, Lucia. Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones . Copper Canyon Press. Kindle Edition.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not entirely sold with the selection process of this Selected; one of my favorite poems ("Viagra," from Inseminating the Elephant) was left out. And the cover design leaves something to be desired. The title, while fitting, isn't her best. But I can't not give five stars to this book, which compiles so much good stuff from a poet I love dearly. I read "On the High Suicide Rate of Dentists" to a friend out loud, who bought the book shortly after. I saw the title "Altered Beast" in the table of contents, hoping and hoping it would be about the Sega Genesis game, and lo and behold, it was!

It was her treatment of pop culture that initially attracted me to Lucia Perillo. What this book revealed to me is that she's not just a pop-culture poet; she's an all-culture poet. She sees the art in all things. Take this passage from "Message Unscripted," one of the new poems near the end:

So for its service,
let's dedicate the next fifty-two seconds to art,
how all things make it, both arachnid ribosomes and rain.
Think of a cloud, think of a geode, think of the mold
on the plate in the fridge.

Her voice strikes just the right balance of humor and erudition and awe for my ear. I just love it. I wish she were around to write more. Reading this Selected made me want to buy the individual volumes and read them in their entirety. I would 100% buy the Collected.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know anything about poetry or how to evaluate it. That being said, I greatly enjoyed this collection from Perillo. I loved her sense of humor, and her viewpoints about illness, mortality, the environment and life in general.

[l · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a harshness to her poetry that I always like in female writers.

[Meredith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid poetry collection

[Danny Caine · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Lucia Perillo died in October 2016, I turned immediately to Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones, her volume of selected and new poems. Perillo, who wrote with candor about her experience with multiple sclerosis, was long one of my favorite poets and Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones collects all of her best work. Whether her subject is sensuality, the challenges of the body, the beauty of nature, or poignant narrative anecdotes from her own life, reading Perillo is always a delight. Rarely are poetic subjects of such weight treated with such candor and humor. A Perillo poem can take any number of turns or twists, and widen or narrow its scope with agility, but it’s never alienating or too full of itself. We lost a great poet when Lucia Perillo died this year; fortunately, we can remember her with this big, rewarding book.

[Patti K · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poetry that came out in 2015 is a wonderful
introduction or rereading of Perillo's captivating work.
She has wit, exquisite details of biological lives of plants
and other objects and humor and serious scrutiny of many
concerns and questions. They are long poems so that the
reader has to focus and stay with her long flow. But the
effort is well worth the while. Recommend.

[Simeon Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Micro-blurb: a nimble trompe l'oeil of mortal camouflage.