The raw experience of mortality, met through the illness and death of a close friend, the tensions of history, and the texture of family life, distinguishes Joyce Perseroff's third book of poems. She writes about women pierced by sickness, abandonment, and lost innocence -- war survivor and mill worker, immigrant's daughter and wry lover. With scrupulous precision, Mortal Education maps a cherished and perishing world.

What endures the encroachments of time, history nature and mortality? Peseroff speculates with a
clear-headed, wry look at the world's catalogues and almanacs of largesse--lilies, Jerry Garcia, men
in fog, animal joy--as well as its sorrow. In startling original poems full of leaps and digressions that
reveal the mind in action, readers will encounter life through a person made raw by observation, a mind
processing loss and mortality in a petal, a poet alert to how syntax and language can reconfigure the
experience of grief.

Joyce Peseroff's new collection teases the nature of self-knowledge from a world where identity is fluid, character fragmented, landscape overwhelmed, and culture riven. In poems that dramatize politics, eros, myth, and mortality, Peseroff's edgy wit cuts through the classical Greek definition--"You're not an animal/or a god, take the middle path"--to parse our century's slippery dialectics. Playful and complex, Know Thyself distills music from the salt of human experience.