2007
First Published
4.11
Average Rating
256
Number of Pages
During her days as a park ranger, Lucia Perillo loved nothing more than to brave the Cascade Mountains alone, taking special pride in her daring solo skis down the raw, unpatrolled slopes of Mount Rainier. Then, in her thirties, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In I've Heard the Vultures Singing, Perillo confronts, in stark but funny terms, the ironies of being someone with her history and gusto for life being suddenly unable to walk. ("Ground-truthing" is what biologists call entering an environment and surveying what is there via the senses of sight and sound.) These essays explore what it’s like to experience desire as a sick person, how to lower one’s expectations just enough for a wilderness experience, and how to navigate the vagaries of a disease that has no predictable trajectory. I've Heard the Vultures Singing records in unflinching, honest prose one woman’s struggle to find her place in a difficult new world.
Avg Rating
4.11
Number of Ratings
88
5 STARS
41%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
24%
2 STARS
1%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads
Author
Lucia Perillo
Author · 10 books
Lucia Perillo published five books of poetry. Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management and subsequently worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her M.A. in English at Syracuse University, and taught at Saint Martin's College, and in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. Her work appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Kenyon Review. Luck Is Luck was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. A former MacArthur fellow, Perillo lived in Olympia, Washington with her husband.
