Lia Purpura's essays are full of joy in the act of intense observation;
they're also deliciously subversive and alert to the ways language gets
locked and loaded by culture. These elegant, conversational excursions
refuse to let a reader slide over anything, from the tiniest shards of
beach glass to barren big-box wastelands. They detonate distractedness,
superficiality, artificiality. In the process, Purpura inhabits many
stances: metaphysician and biologist, sensualist and witness--all in
service of illuminating that which Virginia Woolf called "moments of
being"--previously unworded but palpably felt states of existence and
knowing. Rough Likeness finds worlds in the minute, and crafts
monuments to beauty and strangeness.