Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2009
Perillo left Random House to join Copper Canyon
Executive Editor Michael Wiegers never accepted a book faster than this one
Perillo is a Macarthur "Genius" Fellowship and has been featured on the cover of American Poetry Review
Perillo is the only poet to have won both the Kate Tufts Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award
The biography is of interest: Perillo was a park ranger in the Cascade Mountains and in her 30s she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Now she is in a wheelchair. Many of her poems candidly deal with how she negotiates the disease. Her much-praised nonfiction book, I Heard the Vultures Singing, takes the subject head-on.
The poems are gripping, and it is fair to call this book a "page turner."