Inseminating the Elephant

The title just grabs you doesn’t it? If we ever write a book, we’re going to call it “Inseminating the Elephant”, because nobody will be able to pass it by without picking it up.

Wait? What? Someone already has a book called “Inseminating the Elephant”? And she’s reading from it tonight at 7:30 pm at Open Books?

Olympia poet and MacArthur Fellow Lucia Perillo’s fifth collection of poetry, Inseminating the Elephant ($22 Copper Canyon Press), is a subtly stunning book. Reading it is a visceral experience, and not only because viscera make an appearance (her background in wildlife management shapes several of the poems). It is also a cerebral experience (again, not only because gray matter is discussed). Her gift for merging the deeply philosophical with the beautiful, comical, difficult real in her poems is unparalleled. She is a fearless observer and elegant reporter of the natural world, the social world, and her personal world, which has been increasingly affected by illness. But that suggests those are all discrete, when in fact, as her work so gracefully illustrates, it’s one world, messy and glorious and painful, entered one way and left one way. Her honesty, her scalpel-sharp eye, mind, and pen make for poetry that is a bracing tonic — not a cure (for there is no cure), but a nourishment, delicious and sustaining.

OK, back to the drawing board, I guess.