The Oldest Map with the Name America: New and Selected Poems

Whether recalling the first moon landing (""Apollo"") or reflecting on sound enhancement during a film's post-production (""Foley""), Perillo, in her mature work, manages to weave stark erotic confessions into the fabric of mass culture, all the while reeling off a taut and jaunty music in line after line. The first half of Perillo's third collection selects from her two university press books, Dangerous Life and The Body Mutinies. There, the collisions of a ""dangerous life"" (which the poet sports as a ""merit badge"") with self-betraying bodies are always evident, but seldom with the extended lyrical panache one finds in the more recent poems, like ""The Sutro Baths"": ""They were viscera inside the city,/ another window in a row of windows painted black,/ a name trafficked in the freebie papers, hothouse/ orchid without any petals, the sex parts gorged/ & becoming the flower's lusher hub."" Perillo's best recent poems enact quirky dramas: ""Palimpsest"" finds the poet on a shoreside stroll, jousting with Socrates, Derrida and even Plato, ""who has floundered off/ in cloudy collegiate bongwater toward my brain's/ furthest neural atoll."" One might quibble that this and similar poems, like ""Short Course in Semiotics,"" only glancingly take on their professed subjects (""words like `patriarchy' and `oppression'... have been Mixmastered into her thinking""), and fall short of Susan Wheeler's all-out assaults on the decorum of allusion. Nevertheless Perillo's clear-minded, clearly amused musings will appeal to ""a teenager in Army fatigues,"" ""scientists in Seattle"" and bored graduate students alike. (Apr.)