A measure of heaven

Van Winckel, Nance

Pereira, Peter

Floating Bridge Press

Peter Pereira is at the forefront of a national movement of medical practitioners who utilize literature as a part of their training. Saying the World arises from his practice as a family physician serving the urban poor, as well as his experience as a childless gay man.
Selected from over one thousand entries in the Hayden Carruth Award, judges Gregory Orr and Sam Hamill cited Pereira’s work as "full of stunning poems" and noted that Pereira "has the magic touch that William Carlos Williams had—the ability to be doctor and poet simultaneously, and to make it all so simply, deeply, and translucently human that the poems seem inevitable."
from "First Crash Cesarean"
Hold it like a wand, you say as I guide the blade across shaved skin, into layers of yellow fat and fascia stained crimson. With gloved fingers we tug at the wound’s gaping edges until we’ve exposed the bulging uterus, round and smooth as a giant D’Anjou pear. Only minutes ago, I wrote the words fetal distress and panting she signed consent to open her belly. Now I imagine her baby is like Houdini jacketed inside a treasure chest five fathoms down, mouth gagged, lungs bursting, time running out . . . 
Peter Pereira is a family physician in Seattle and currently provides primary care to an urban poor population, including refugees, immigrants, and the elderly. He is the winner of a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, and his poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including JAMA, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and in the anthology To Come to Light: Perspectives on Chronic Illness in Modern Literature.

Saying the World

Literature & Fiction

United States

Copper Canyon Press

“It’s rare in contemporary poetry to find a book as boldly celebratory as Peter Pereira’s new collection.”—Chase Twichell
In What’s Written on the Body, physician Peter Pereira explores the body, medicine, wordplay, gardening, family, and domestic gay life, often drawing from his experience as a community clinic doctor in Seattle.
An avid Scrabble player, anagrammer, and cruciverbalist, Pereira opens the collection with a delightful selection of wordplay poems, as a counterpoint to poems recounting the day-to-day practice of a family physician, from suturing a wound in the ER to extracting an eraser from a child’s nose.
 From “Body Talk”:
 Do you hear how the scalp claps? How the heart contains the earth, yet is also a hater? How saliva is lava, while testicles sit elect for their slice test . . . 
 Peter Pereira is a family physician in Seattle, where he cares for an urban, underserved population of immigrants, refugees, housing project residents, and the elderly. His first book won the Hayden Carruth Award, and his individual poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Poetry,USA Weekend, and The Journal of the American Medical Association.

What's Written on the Body

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