I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature

by Lucia Perillo

Overview

Acclaimed poet and MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Lucia Perillo, a former park ranger who loved to hike the Cascade Mountains alone and prided herself on daring solo skis down the wild slopes of Mount Rainier, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when she was in her thirties. I've Heard the Vultures Singing is a clear-eyed and brazenly outspoken examination of her life as a person with disabilities. In unwavering and witty prose, and without a trace of self-pity, she contemplates the bitter ironies of being unable to walk, what it’s like to experience eros as a sick person, how to lower one’s expectations for a wilderness experience, and how to deal with the vagaries of a disease that has no predictable trajectory. Masterfully written, the essays resonate with lovers of literature and nature, and with anyone who has dealt with disadvantages of the body or the hard-luck limitations of ordinary life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595340580
Publisher:	Trinity University Press
Publication date:	08/25/2009
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Lucia Perillo (1958-2016) is the author of many collections of poetry: Dangerous Life, which won the Norma Farber Award for best first book; The Body Mutinies, which received the PEN Revson Foundation Fellowship and the Kate Tufts Poetry Award; The Oldest Map with the Name America; Luck Is Luck, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Inseminating the Elephant and On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths. Perillo’s poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and other magazines, and have been included in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart anthologies. She received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2000. She has taught at Syracuse University, Saint Martin’s University, and Southern Illinois University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     xi
A Glimpse     1
Knowledge Game: Gulls     6
Definition of Terms     24
Medicine     31
Job versus Prometheus     46
Inside/Outside     57
A Cripple in the Wilderness     69
Fear of the Market     86
Knowledge Game: Bats     102
Brief History of My Thumb     115
Bonnie Without Clyde: The Romance of Being Bad     121
Sick Fuck     133
Two-Man Boat     148
Knowledge Game: Birdsong     159
On Solitude     177
From the Bardo Zone     189
Sources     209

Editorial Reviews

Encourages us to see the common and invisible through new eyes.”— Bookslut

From the Publisher