Inseminating the Elephant. Lucia Perillo

• 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.”