Inseminating the Elephant

A 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Inseminating the Elephant delivers hard-edged yet vulnerable poems that reconcile the comic impulse with the complications and tragedies of living in the eating and breathing body--what Lucia Perillo calls the "meat cage." Perillo dissects human failings and sexuality, as well as collisions between nature and the manufactured world, to create an unforgettable poetic vision. How the zoologists start is by facing the mirror of her flanks, that foreboding luscious place where the gray hide gives way to a zeroing-in of skin as vulnerable as an orchid. Which is the place to enter, provided you are brave, brave enough to insert your laser-guided camera to avoid the two false openings of her "vestibule," much like the way of entering death, of giving birth to death, calling it forth as described in the Tibetan Book.