The Oldest Map with the Name America [Hardcover]

Lucia Perillo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2, 1999

                                                                                        
Lucia Perillo's poetry embodies a sensibility at once personal and national. Many of her poems are candid and affecting--some document how she negotiates life with multiple sclerosis; others concern her working-class Catholic childhood in a small Hudson River town. But in general, and even in these personal works, her poetry picks up the fragments of American culture--Bart Simpson, crimes of violence, Girl Scouting, teen rebellion, redneck survivalists--and assembles them into a highly readable and illuminating cultural commentary. One poem, "Foley," blends the subjects of  movie sound effects and phone sex to make the point that in electronic America things are seldom as they seem--or sound. In "For I Have Taught the Japanese," an ESL instructor confesses, "I was such/an idiot I even tried to apologize more than once/for Nagasaki." In a third, Perillo thumbs through a survivalist magazine to see what it has to offer to her newborn nephew: "They're hawking a T-shirt: I entered the world/fat, mad, and bald, and I plan on leaving that way."  
    
The texture of Lucia Perillo's writing is conversational, poignant, often mordantly funny. The structure of her work is architectural in its grandeur, dramatic in its impact. Taken together, the poems in The Oldest Map with the Name America present the reader with an important new way of looking at the world--a vision that in its coherence provides us with a deep and original understanding of what we're all about, as individuals and as a culture.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Someday / you could even write a poem," Lucia Perillo tells her newborn nephew in "The Sportsmen's Guide," then ruefully adds,

the tradition of which
pretty much demands the reader be told off the bat
what a muckheap the world is. But then comes the swerve
where the poet flipflops or digresses
to come up with something that the muckheap
will surprise you with.

This is, in a sense, the distillation of both Perillo's poetic voice--funny, knowing, tough--and her mission: to show the world in all its beauty and terror and strangeness. Is there a better title, anywhere, than "Thinking About Illness After Reading About Tennessee Fainting Goats"? ("Stopped in their tracks / they go down like drunks.... / How cruel, gripes a friend. But maybe they show / us what the body's darker fortunes mean-- / we break, we rise. We do what we're here for.")

For Perillo, transcendence is an ambiguous business. "The Body Rising," for instance, moves from airborne disasters and funeral-home smoke to the miracle of teenage punks handed up from the mosh pit "weightless and waterlogged, bullied and buoyed." But for every body rising, there is another that wants to fall. Perillo's women hitchhike and rock climb; they earn their Girl Scout merit badges in "Dangerous Life." In "Pomegranate" her ambivalent Persephone must choose between, on the one hand, "the underground gods and their motorbikes" and, on the other, "daylight, sure / but also living with her mother." It's the tension between these that makes Perillo's dangerous poetry sing; she's like the narrator of "Kilned," who sculpts with molten lava "to see what this catastrophe is saying." The world may indeed be a muckheap, but these poems never fail to surprise. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Whether recalling the first moon landing ("Apollo") or reflecting on sound enhancement during a film's post-production ("Foley"), Perillo, in her mature work, manages to weave stark erotic confessions into the fabric of mass culture, all the while reeling off a taut and jaunty music in line after line. The first half of Perillo's third collection selects from her two university press books, Dangerous Life and The Body Mutinies. There, the collisions of a "dangerous life" (which the poet sports as a "merit badge") with self-betraying bodies are always evident, but seldom with the extended lyrical panache one finds in the more recent poems, like "The Sutro Baths": "They were viscera inside the city,/ another window in a row of windows painted black,/ a name trafficked in the freebie papers, hothouse/ orchid without any petals, the sex parts gorged/ & becoming the flower's lusher hub." Perillo's best recent poems enact quirky dramas: "Palimpsest" finds the poet on a shoreside stroll, jousting with Socrates, Derrida and even Plato, "who has floundered off/ in cloudy collegiate bongwater toward my brain's/ furthest neural atoll." One might quibble that this and similar poems, like "Short Course in Semiotics," only glancingly take on their professed subjects ("words like 'patriarchy' and 'oppression'... have been Mixmastered into her thinking"), and fall short of Susan Wheeler's all-out assaults on the decorum of allusion. Nevertheless Perillo's clear-minded, clearly amused musings will appeal to "a teenager in Army fatigues," "scientists in Seattle" and bored graduate students alike.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 143 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (February 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375501606
• ISBN-13: 978-0375501609
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,030,308 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A NEW POET ON THE AMERICAN MAP, July 18, 2000

By 

Ben Sonnenberg (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Oldest Map with the Name America (Hardcover)

Lucia Perillo, a 2000 MacArthur Fellow, was praised in their citation for her "conscientious candor, meticulously accurate language and comic spirit." This book "synthesizes seemingly disparate elements of classical and popular culture to create a work that is both personal and universal." To which I would add that her poems move and they are moving. Move? They dive and soar and fall and smash and recover and soar again. No other poet of today thrills me like Ms Perillo. No other so often breaks my heart.

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful., September 30, 2009

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Oldest Map with the Name America (Hardcover)

Lucia Perillo, The Oldest Map with the Name America (Random House, 1999)

I'm still trying to figure out why my library catalog has this one listed as a young adult title.

"God for how many years did I believe there were truly laws against such things,

laws of adulthood: no yelling out of cars in traffic tunnels, no walking without shoes,

no singing any foolish songs in public places. Or else they could lock you in jail

or, as good as condemning you to death, tell both your lower- and upper-case Catholic fathers.

And out of all these crimes, unveiling of the body was of course the worst, as though something

about the skin's phosphorescence, its surface as velvet as a deer's new horn,

could drive not only men but civilization mad, could lead us to unspeakable cruelties.

There were elders who from experience understood these things much better than we.

And it's true: remembering I had that kind of skin does drive me half-crazy with loss.

Skin like the spathe of a broad white lily on the first morning it unfurls."

("Skin")

And that's the stanza after the one about getting naked in the back of the car. Well, I guess they read more explicit things in Lauren Myracle novels (it was only my commitment to the tenets of freedom of speech that kept me from stealing my kid's copy after I tried to read ttyl), but even if you're open-minded enough to think of getting naked in the backs of cars as age-appropriate, it's the rare middle-schooler who's going to read that language and really get the most out of it. If you're older, on the other hand, and have both a good enough grasp of the intricacies of language (and a vocabulary good enough to know "spathe" without looking it up), as well as an appreciation for words strung together beautifully, then The Oldest Map with the Name America is a must-have for your poetry shelf. Perillo's work is earthy, sensual, spicy, with enough detach to keep the reader from cringing (most of the time) when she's describing, say, rampant heroin addiction among certain friends of the family, but enough immediateness to keep the reader coming back for more. Like most poets capable of pulling this kind of thing off, Perillo also has a magic-realist streak about a mile wide (must I do more than mention the wonderful poem title "The Salmon Underneath the City"?) that stays grounded thanks to her incredible eye for detail (the poem after that: "The Ghost Shirt", which mixes Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee with the events in New York City on April 1, 1992; for those middle-graders who might actually be reading this review, that's the day the Rodney King riots started). Oddly, the whole taken together reminds me of the work of Nick Mamatas, especially Northern Gothic, but I've been trying to figure out why for three days now and still haven't come up with a reason. Read both, maybe you can figure it out. They're both well worth your time. And while I can't really quote it, because the poem is one four-page single-spaced strophe, I'll just tell you to go find yourself a copy of the poem "Foley" if you're still undecided. That's one of those "wow" poems. Read it and fall in love with Lucia Perillo. ****