Lucia Perillo
The Oldest Map with the Name America
Random House, $19.95, 128 pp.
When I'm looking for self-consciousness I pick up books like Lucia Perillo's latest volume. Perillo seems keenly aware of her audience - not the audience of readers, but the audience that witnesses the daily and mundane performances ("habits," maybe?) comprising existence.
For example, the transformation of writing into a performance allows Perillo's narrators to struggle conspicuously for the right words. In "Pomegranate," the narrator argues with herself about whether the word "eat" describes adequately what one does with the "plush red seeds;" in other spots, an older self observes the younger self inside a sleeping bag
where finally the teeth of my centermost zipperIf there are no words for the landscape that surrounds Perillo, she turns instead to nonverbal communication. In "Foley," she deconstructs cinematic sound: "what sounds like his boots are really bricks being drudged / through a boxful of coffee beans." "Air Guitar" considers the relationship between sound and motion. Phrases like "quietly as glands," "the wrong words hobbling their tongues," "… women ripped the pages out / and chewed them silently and swallowed" and "men are stuffed and full to bursting / with their quiet" challenge the literary affinity for linking silence with stillness.
scratched their cold across my tit.
Only I didn't say tit, think tit, there was no word
for that landscape ("Apollo").
When he defined the so-called Elliptical school, Stephen Burt wrote that Elliptical poets "delete transitions." By contrast, Perillo is a master of transitions, guiding the reader easily from humping cats to sixties girl-groups to the inadequate languages of love. However, Burt continues, "it's performance and demonstration - if you can hear me through all of this noise I must be real." Certainly, Perillo takes this theory of performance into consideration, although we can never be sure if we are really in her chosen audience. "Self-portrait in Two Ages" asks, "Who is this girl, standing close to the roadway?" The answer: "Okay, it's me - but let's not get nostalgic." The younger looks at the older self, and Perillo positions us to observe, from a safe distance, how one fearfully resists the other until "passing into someday when she - gone / matronly, stern - will have her own self to answer to."
- Rita Rich