Time will clean the carcass bones Selected and new poems

*Starred Review* Perillo, a MacArthur fellow, is a boldly and imaginatively irreverent poet even as she marvels at the wonders all around us and hopes for sacred knowledge. How, she asks, can we meet the demands of life? How can we accept pain and impairment, pay attention to all the flourishes around us, even tiny mayflies, and be uplifted by the life force that defies gravity, ensures procreation, and steeps us in sensory abundance? In each of her previous five poetry collections, Perillo explores these intrinsic challenges to our quest to be fully human with wit, artistry, and wisdom. Selections from Dangerous Life (1989), The Oldest Map with the Name of America (1999), Luck Is Luck (2005), and On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (2012), one of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2012, lead the reader to the closing run of superbly provocative new poems. In Daisies vs. Bees, Perillo nimbly formulates an amusing yet profound equation of tricky choices, balancing the bad with the good, the enticing with the deadly. She widens the lens in The Great Wave: Now that we've entered the wave of extinction / let's sing while we still can, / before we all go where the dinosaurs went. Perillo also makes astute and arresting observations about the constant torrent of information, most intriguingly in Elegy for Idle Curiosity, and contemplates, in the title poem, what we leave behind in bones and books.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

With this volume that spans more than 20 years and six poetry collections, Perillo (On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths), a poet, fiction writer, and MacArthur Fellow, exhibits her range and depth in exquisite yet unfussy poems. She writes skillfully of urban, suburban, and wild environments, but she's nearly unparalleled when addressing the "meat cage," and its pain and mortality. Perillo's poems move against the backdrop of her own struggle with multiple sclerosis: "If I sleep on my belly, pinning it down,/ my breasts start puling like baby pigs/ trapped under their slab of torpid mother." Yet these vivacious poems reveal humor, sexuality, and a sharp sense of images and turns of phrase. Her 4-page narrative poem, "Limits," may be one of the most graphic and vulnerable poems about death in the genre, but Perillo's later poems move away from dense text and rich narrative, opening up into shorter pieces, and the kind of long, airy, and sprawling single-line stanzas found in her magnetic poem "The Rape of Blanche DuBois." Few writers capture the beautiful and the sordid as well as Perillo, and this marvelous collection is full of "those black moments that contained both the ardor and the horror, and the wonder at their having been simultaneously created." (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.