Peter Pereira is a family physician in Seattle and a founding editor of Floating Bridge Press. He received his MD from the university of Washington in 1987 and completed his residency in Family Medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center in 1990. He currently provides primary care to an urban poor population at High Point Community Clinic, in West Seattle. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary magazines, including JAMA, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry, Poetry East, Seattle Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Willow Springs; and in the anthology To come to light: Perspectives on Chronic Illness in Modern Literature. He was the winner of a 1997 “Discovery”/The Nation Award, and his first chapbook, The Lost Twin, was published by Grey Spider Press in 2000. Saying the World, won the 2002 Hayden Carruth award from Copper Canyon Press.

About What's Written on the Body:

"One of the great ideas of the West is that the Word has become flesh and dwells among us. In doctor and poet Peter Pereira's lovely new book, words are fleshy, mealleable things. They stretch and bend, are multicolored, porous, warm, and full of yearning blood. They cover and protect us, are the things with which we touch. Whether recounting the unpeakable horror witnessed by a Cambodian patient, or gamboling with the most unexpected puns, Pereira reminds us the body is a holy site of utterance."
—Rebecca Brown

"Pereira is a master of many modes, all of them yeilding either wisdom or delight. Here we find poems in which anagrams bustle towards revelation, or ones where we stand alongside the poet-doctor as he steadfastly gazes and does his best to heal, or others where we accompany poet and partner as they move through a world loving has made in the midst of the multiple dismantlings time and flesh bequeath us."
—Gregory Orr

"It's rare in contemporary poetry to find a book as boldly celebratory as Peter Pereira's new collection."
—Chase Twitchell