The Oldest Map with the Name America

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 stro

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.