Luck is luck

the long version

From the snowy egret to a woman's floating rib, nudism in America to Holy Communion, Simone de Beauvoir to Nathan's hot dogs-the subjects in Lucia Perillo's fourth collection of poetry lift off from surprising places and touch down on new ground. In "To My Big Nose," she muses: "hard to imagine what the world would have looked like / if not seen through your pink shadow. / You who are built from random parts / like a mythical creature-a gryphon or sphinx-." Fearless, focused, ironic, irreverent, truly and deeply felt, the poems in Luck Is Luck draw upon the circumstances of being a woman, the harsh realities of nature, the comfort of familiar things, and universally recognizable anxieties about faith and grief, love and desire. In "Languedoc," she writes, "Long ago / I might have been attracted by your tights and pantaloons, / but now they just look silly, ditto for your instrument / that looks like a gourd with strings attached / (the problem is always the strings attached)." Perillo's versions of nature are always unflinching: "Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree, / a dead hawthorn at the base of a hill. / The shrike had pinned smaller birds on the tree's black thorns / and the sun had stripped them of their feathers. / ... well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless. / With a chunk of sky in each eye socket. / And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl." Down-to-earth, full of playful twists of language, and woven from grand themes in an accessible, appealing way, these poems pierce the heart and delight the mind. Not one word is wasted.