Perdido
In Perdido, Elaine Terranova’s seventh collection, the poet ponders the predicament of loss—“I want the dead but I am beside / the living.” But for Terranova, perdido does not mean loss merely. Like the music from which she borrows her term, these poems bound with resilience.
“In the poems of Perdido an ideal is developed, which is ached for by the characters and by us. The book sheds its skin of loss and forms a cocoon ready to deal with ‘the ping of forever’ or to react to ‘a plastic acrid bird of fire lifted into the air.’ I’m not sure whether the book breaks or soothes the hearts of those involved. It’s a contemporary myth I haven’t seen before. You should read it.”
About the Author
Elaine Terranova has published six collections of poems, most recently Dollhouse, which won the 2013 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks. Her poems and prose have appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies and her translation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis was published by the Penn Greek Drama Series. Her awards include grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, NEA And Pew fellowships, and a Pushcart Prize. She is presently working on a childhood memoir.
