"Purpura is the real deal, and so is every successive sentence in this
collection. A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of
expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult
witnessing. . . ."--Albert Goldbarth
"Purpura's prose is a system of delicate shocks--leaps and connections
and syncopated revelations, all in the service of the spirit negotiating
the truth of its experience."--Sven Birkerts
Lia Purpura's daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is
concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly
wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the
commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and
even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura's hand is clearly
guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit
instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson's words: I like the silent
church before the sermon begins.
In Autopsy Report, Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our
bodies after death, examining the dripping fruits of organs and the
spine in its wet, red earth. A similar reverence is held for the alien
jellyfish in On Form, where she notes that in order to see their
particular beauty...we have to suspend our fear, we have to love
contradiction. Her essays question art and its responses as well as its
responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and
alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing
and the sensual.
Above all, Purpura's essays are a call to notice. She is
writer-as-telescope, kaleidoscope, microscope, and mirror. As she says:
By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me
to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another,
and rare. This is, indeed, a rare and startling treasure of a book.
Lia Purpura is the author of Increase (essays), Stone Sky
Lifting (poems), The Brighter the Veil (poems), and Poems of
Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (translations).
Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in
Prose, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Associated Writing
Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Ohio State University
Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in
Agni, DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry
in Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Writer-in-Residence at
Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at the Rainier
Writing Workshop MFA Program in Tacoma, Washington.
