A powerful new collection from poet, essayist, and frequent New
Yorker contributor Lia Purpura
Lia Purpura has won national acclaim as both a poet and an essayist. The
exquisitely rendered poems in this, her fourth collection, reach back to
an early affinity for proverbs and riddles and the proto-poetry found in
those forms. Taking on epic subjects--time and memory, metamorphosis and
indeterminacy, the complicated nature of beauty, wordless states of
being--each poem explores a bright, crisp, singular moment of awareness
or shock or revelation. Purpura reminds us that short poems, never
merely brief nor fragmentary, can transcend their size, like small dogs,
espresso, a drop of mercury.