Lucia Perillo, a poet who wrote about mortality with a combination of humor and piercing emotion, died on Oct. 16 at her home in Olympia, Wash. She was 58.
The death was announced by her publisher, Copper Canyon Press. Ms. Perillo received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 1988, when she was 30.
In March, Dwight Garner, reviewing “Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones,” a collection of both old and new work, in The New York Times, described Ms. Perillo’s poetry as “shrewd, well-organized free verse that marches straight down the page while its meanings peel off in multiple directions.”
In one poem, the line “Today I bit a thick hangnail” leads to “Who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?” In “The Revelation,” she observes: “And the whores were in the Safeway,/buying frozen foods and Cokes,/for the sitters before their evening shifts.”
Her illness became a central focus of her work. In “The News (A Manifesto),” Ms. Perillo acknowledged that just keeping body and soul together was exhausting. She made a “vow to stay vigilant,” specifically “to keep the meat between one’s ribs from being torn, to keep the hard marble of the cranium covered with its own skin.”
In “The Body Mutinies,” she remembered simply, “I was young for a minute, but then I got old.”
Ms. Perillo’s poetry collections also include “Inseminating the Elephant,” a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize; “Luck Is Luck,” a 2005 finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and “On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths” (2012), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. She also wrote a book of essays, “I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing,” and a short-story collection, “Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain.”
In The Los Angeles Times in February, Craig Morgan Teicher praised her fervor and courage, noting, “Each dose of hopelessness is met with some kind of call for singing.” And in 2000, when she had been named a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the poet Rodney Jones told The Chicago Tribune: “Her goal is lucidity. She does not like the idea of writing a poem that people cannot understand.”
Lucia Maria Perillo was born on Sept. 30, 1958, in Manhattan and grew up in suburban Irvington, N.Y. She was the third of four children of Robert Joseph Perillo, a lawyer, and the former Marie Joan Kucija, a librarian. Her mother’s parents were born in Croatia and her father’s in Italy.
Because her mother hoped she would become a doctor, Lucia planned to study biology. But by the time she graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979, she had narrowed her major to wildlife management.
She took a job in Denver, doing animal damage control research for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Her interest in poetry began soon after; readings were among the few events she felt comfortable attending alone as a single woman in a new city.
That interest blossomed. Moving to California in 1981 to work at the San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge, she enrolled in a poetry-writing workshop at San Jose State University. It was taught by Robert Hass, who later became the poet laureate of the United States.
During the 1980s, Ms. Perillo moved to Olympia; worked at Mount Rainier National Park and St. Martin’s College; earned a master’s degree in English from Syracuse University; taught at Syracuse and at the Warren Wilson College M.F.A. program in North Carolina; wrote her first book, “Dangerous Life”; and, before it was published, learned she had M.S. It was something she had suspected because of a period of neurological problems right after college.
She met James Rudy, a theater sound engineer, at Syracuse, and they married in 1993.
Ms. Perillo began teaching in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University in 1991 and remained until 2000, when she was no longer physically able to continue her commuter marriage. (She would travel to Olympia on weekends to see her husband.) She was in the process of packing to move back to Washington when the telephone call came from the MacArthur Foundation with the news that she had won a $500,000 fellowship.
As she confessed to reporters, Ms. Perillo was, in fact, in the middle of (or about to start — reports varied) cleaning the bathroom in the house she was leaving behind. And after learning the news, she went back to cleaning.
A year later, Ms. Perillo was in a wheelchair. In an interview for The American Poetry Review in 2014, she presented her situation straightforwardly. Asked about battling her disease, she said: “I don’t battle M.S. I relent to its humiliations.” How did she manage not to fall into despair? “I’ve already fallen. This is the voice from the swamp.”
In addition to her husband, her survivors include her mother; two brothers, Bob and Mark; and a sister, Ellen Perillo.
Ms. Perillo told Publishers Weekly in March that her routine had changed because of caregivers’ schedules, and that she was working on poems about distraction. She was also trying to force herself to work on a typewriter.
“I’ve been typing on the computer for years,” she said, “but it really adds editing into the creative process too early
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