Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Lucia Maria Perillo’s "News (A Manifesto)" is an unflinching examination of fear, violence, and the illusions of safety in a world that continually betrays its inhabitants—especially women. The poem takes the form of a manifesto, not in the sense of a call to action, but as a declaration of hard-earned awareness, a statement of vigilance in the face of pervasive and systemic threats. Moving through stark, sometimes grotesque imagery, Perillo dismantles the idea that protection is possible, that fear can be contained within borders, doors, or even the body itself. Ultimately, "News (A Manifesto)" reveals a world where external dangers merge with internal ones, where survival is an ongoing negotiation between autonomy and entrapment.

The poem opens with a disturbing piece of news: “So today, yet another Guyanese will try to run the border / dressed in a dead housewife’s hair—all they’ve recovered / since her disappearance in a downtown shopping mall.” This surreal, almost nightmarish image collapses multiple narratives of violence—migration, gendered brutality, and the erasure of individual identity. The “dead housewife” is reduced to her hair, a detail that underscores both the physical remnants of a life lost and the way victims of violence are fragmented in news coverage, their stories condensed into eerie artifacts. The “incident” is called a “routine occurrence” in the paper, a phrase that highlights the numbing repetition of violence, the way horror becomes mundane in media discourse. The use of “publicans”—a biblical allusion to tax collectors and bureaucrats—implies a cynicism toward those in power, those who claim to maintain order but instead allow suffering to become normalized.

Rejecting passive acceptance, the speaker issues a personal vow: “Rather: / vow to stay vigilant against the maiming / that waits in each landscape, even in this / mundane procession of muddy spring days.” The juxtaposition of “maiming” with “mundane” suggests that danger is not confined to sensationalized events but is embedded in the ordinary. The poem refuses the comfort of everyday routines, instead insisting that vigilance must be maintained at all times.

The next lines expose the fragility of the body: “To see / the tenacity of rooted hair for what it is: / an illusion as fleeting as courage.” Hair, often a symbol of vitality and identity, becomes a deceptive sign of permanence, just as courage itself is revealed to be transient. This recognition leads into the poem’s broader meditation on bodily vulnerability: “To keep the meat / between one’s ribs from being torn, to keep the hard / marble of the cranium covered with its own skin.” The speaker acknowledges the stark reality of corporeal existence—flesh and bone are not just metaphors but materials subject to destruction. The body, rather than being a site of strength, is a precarious thing that must be actively defended.

This sense of bodily peril expands into reproductive anxiety: “To keep both breasts / attached and undiseased. To keep the womb empty; / and yet to keep the organs living there / from shriveling like uneaten fruit, from turning / black and dropping.” Here, the speaker confronts the impossible balancing act of womanhood—preserving the body from both violence and natural decay, maintaining a womb that must remain simultaneously empty and alive. The image of “shriveling like uneaten fruit” conveys both biological and societal pressures: the expectation to bear children versus the fear of what that entails.

The poem refuses to reduce danger to a simple binary of public versus private space: “And not to mistake the danger / for a simple matter of whether / to put the body on the streets, of walking / or of staying home—;” The punctuation forces a pause, emphasizing the false choice presented to women: that safety can be ensured through confinement. But as the next lines reveal, even the home is no sanctuary: “there are household cleansers / that can scar a woman deeper than a blade / or dumdum bullets. The kitchen drawers are full of tools / that lie unchaperoned.” Domesticity itself is rendered dangerous. The mention of “household cleansers” suggests chemical burns or poisoning, reinforcing the idea that threats exist within the space that is supposed to protect. The “unchaperoned” tools in kitchen drawers—knives, perhaps even scissors or rolling pins—suggest that violence is omnipresent, woven into the fabric of daily life.

The poem’s paranoia is not unjustified but well-founded, as demonstrated in the next lines: “Even with the doors and windows / bolted, in the safety of my bed, I am haunted by the sound / of him (her, it, them) stalking the hallway.” The use of shifting pronouns—“him (her, it, them)”—widens the scope of danger beyond a singular figure. Threats are amorphous, unidentifiable, capable of taking multiple forms. The reference to “Pavlovian drool” emphasizes predation; the figure in the hallway is already conditioned to pursue violence.

The threat extends into public spaces: “Or him waiting in the urine-soaked garages of this city’s / leading department stores, waiting to deliver up the kiss / of a gunshot, the blunted kiss of a simple length of pipe.” The phrase “urine-soaked garages” reinforces the grim reality of urban landscapes where violence thrives. The “kiss” of a gunshot or pipe transforms brutality into something grotesquely intimate, inverting the tenderness associated with the word. Violence is no longer impersonal—it is close, deliberate, unavoidable.

Yet, the speaker broadens the scope of fear beyond interpersonal violence to include institutional and existential threats: “But of course I mean a larger fear: the kiss / of amputation, the therapeutic kiss of cobalt. / The kiss of a deformed child.” The reference to “cobalt” evokes cancer treatment, radiation therapy, and the body’s betrayal through illness. The “deformed child” points to reproductive anxiety, the fear of what is created within, of what the body might unwittingly produce.

The final section critiques societal structures that promise security but instead enforce submission: “The kiss of automatic garage-door openers that / despite the dropped eyelid of their descent do nothing / to bar a terror needing no window for entry: / it resides within.” Even modern conveniences, designed for comfort and protection, are powerless against the true source of fear—one that exists internally as much as externally. The fear “resides within,” suggesting not only paranoia but an awareness that societal structures cannot offer real safety.

The closing lines bring the poem full circle, addressing the speaker’s mother: “And where do we turn for protection / from ourselves? My mother, for example, recommends marriage— / to a physician or some other wealthy healer.” The mother’s advice reveals the traditional expectation that a woman must seek security through marriage, that stability comes from being kept rather than being independent. But the final lines expose the sinister truth behind this advice: “Of course / it’s him, leering from his station behind her shoulder, / who’s making her say such things: the witch doctor, / headhunter, the corporate shaman, his scalpel / drawn & ready, my scalp his ticket out.” The physician, the supposed protector, becomes another predator, another figure of control. The “scalpel”—ostensibly a tool for healing—becomes an instrument of harm, reinforcing that power structures, whether medical, corporate, or marital, are complicit in the cycle of violence.

"News (A Manifesto)" is a chilling, unrelenting exploration of fear in its many forms—gendered violence, bodily decay, economic entrapment, and institutional control. Perillo does not offer false hope or resolution; instead, she exposes the inescapability of these forces, rejecting the idea that safety can be guaranteed by external measures. The poem demands vigilance, not as a means of conquering fear, but as an acknowledgment that to exist as a woman in this world is to live with the constant negotiation of danger. The manifesto, then, is not a call to arms but a recognition of the battleground.

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