Inseminating the Elephant

Inseminating the Elephant PDF Author: Lucia Perillo
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320231
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
"Inseminating the Elephant [is] a collection of poems, often laced with humor, that examines popular culture, the limits of the human body, and the tragicomic aspects of everyday experience."—Pulitzer Prize finalist citation "These poems are tough and witty."—The New Yorker "Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo."—Time Out New York 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. Lucia Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal and worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her MA in English at Syracuse University, and has published five books of poetry. She was a MacArthur Fellow in 2000 and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

Inseminating the Elephant

Inseminating the Elephant PDF Author: Lucia Perillo
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320231
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 113

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Inseminating the Elephant [is] a collection of poems, often laced with humor, that examines popular culture, the limits of the human body, and the tragicomic aspects of everyday experience."—Pulitzer Prize finalist citation "These poems are tough and witty."—The New Yorker "Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo."—Time Out New York 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. Lucia Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal and worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her MA in English at Syracuse University, and has published five books of poetry. She was a MacArthur Fellow in 2000 and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

The Rediscovery of the Wild

The Rediscovery of the Wild PDF Author: Peter H. Kahn (Jr.)
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026201873X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
A compelling case for connecting with the wild, for our psychological and physical well-being and to flourish as a species We often enjoy the benefits of connecting with nearby, domesticated nature--a city park, a backyard garden. But this book makes the provocative case for the necessity of connecting with wild nature--untamed, unmanaged, not encompassed, self-organizing, and unencumbered and unmediated by technological artifice. We can love the wild. We can fear it. We are strengthened and nurtured by it. As a species, we came of age in a natural world far wilder than today's, and much of the need for wildness still exists within us, body and mind. The Rediscovery of the Wild considers ways to engage with the wild, protect it, and recover it--for our psychological and physical well-being and to flourish as a species. The contributors offer a range of perspectives on the wild, discussing such topics as the evolutionary underpinnings of our need for the wild; the wild within, including the primal passions of sexuality and aggression; birding as a portal to wildness; children's fascination with wild animals; wildness and psychological healing; the shifting baseline of what we consider wild; and the true work of conservation.

On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths

On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths PDF Author: Lucia Perillo
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320266
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 107

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Book Description
"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, she pulls readers into the beat and whirl of her slyly devastating descriptions."—Booklist "Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo. She writes accessible, often funny poems that border on the profane."—Time Out New York The poetry of Lucia Perillo is fierce, tragicomic, and contrarian, with subjects ranging from coyotes and Scotch broom to local elections and family history. Formally braided, Perillo gathers strands of the mythic and mundane, of media and daily life, as she faces the treachery of illness and draws readers into poems rich in image and story. 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? Today I bit a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum, who walked four days into the jungle and stayed for the kindness of the tribe— who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender? Lucia Perillo's Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the Bobbitt award from the Library of Congress. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

Elephant Seals

Elephant Seals PDF Author: Burney J. Le Beouf
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520328159
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The largest of all seals, elephant seals rank among the most impressive of marine mammals. They are renowned for their spectacular recovery from near-extinction at the end of the nineteenth century when seal hunters nearly eliminated the entire northern species. No other vertebrate has come so close to extinction and made such a complete recovery. The physiological extremes that elephant seals can tolerate are also remarkable: females fast for a month while lactating, and the largest breeding males fast for over one hundred days during the breeding seasons, at which times both sexes lose forty percent of their body weight. Elephant seals dive constantly during their long foraging migrations, spending more time under water than most whales and diving deeper and longer than any other marine mammal. This first book-length discussion of elephant seals brings together worldwide expertise from scientists who describe and debate recent research, including the history and status of various populations, their life-history tactics, and other findings obtained with the help of modern microcomputer diving instruments attached to free-ranging seals. Essential for all marine mammalogists for its information and its methodological innovations, Elephant Seals will also illuminate current debates about species extinctions and possible means of preventing them. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

I've Heard the Vultures Singing

I've Heard the Vultures Singing PDF Author: Lucia Perillo
Publisher: Trinity University Press
ISBN: 1595340920
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
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.

Human Breeding-The Elephant in the Room

Human Breeding-The Elephant in the Room PDF Author: Lyn Victor Williams
Publisher: Authorhouse UK
ISBN: 9781496984708
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
I believe psychologists and psychiatrists are barking up the wrong tree. We do not suffer from psychological problems or mental problems directly, but we do suffer from emotional problems. It is now accepted that we are born with most, if not all, our emotions fixed. Therefore our emotional state must be hereditary, some good and some not so good. But we must not blame our parents because they have been burdened also. the way we are reared will affect the strength of these emotions. I believe that people with 'psychological' problems could recover much quicker if this theory is explained to them.

Break the Glass

Break the Glass PDF Author: Jean Valentine
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320142
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
"As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."—Library Journal In her eleventh collection—honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry—Jean Valentine characteristically weds a moral imperative to imaginative and linguistic leaps and bounds. Whether writing elegies, meditations on aging, or an extended homage to Lucy, the earliest known hominid, the pared-down compactness of her tone and vision reveals a singular voice in American poetry. As Adrienne Rich has said of Valentine's work, "This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way." From "If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them": At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold and damp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking if they had any heaters. They had one heater. You are ill, please you take it. Thank you for visiting my dream. * Can you breathe all right? Break the glass shout break the glass force the room break the thread Open the music behind the glass . . . Jean Valentine, a former State Poet of New York, earned a National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia University. She lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones

Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones PDF Author: Lucia Perillo
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619321505
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"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.

The Poem Is You

The Poem Is You PDF Author: Stephanie Burt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
The variety of contemporary American poetry leaves many readers overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, he presents 60 poems, each with an original essay explaining how the poem works, why it matters, and how it speaks to other parts of art and culture.

Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories PDF Author: Lucia Perillo
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393084019
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
A stunning debut from an award-winning poet. Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo’s story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them and are surprised when the world comes roaring back. An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter’s badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who serves as an accomplice to her younger sister’s sexual exploits and her aging mother’s fantasies of revenge. Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we draw the boundaries between these two zones. What’s funny, what’s heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?