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”Lia 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. The essays, keyed to a rare precision, model the movement of the inner life, but they open in wide surprise to the sensuous outer world. They are fresh and utterly original.”
—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.”
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 was awarded a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose. Her collection of essays, Increase, won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2000. Her collection of poems, Stone Sky Lifting, won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award and was published in 2000 as well. She is also the author of The Brighter the Veil (winner of the Towson University Prize in Literature), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash, translated on a Fulbright year in Poland. A graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching/Writing Fellow in Poetry, she has published poems and essays in many magazines, including Agni Review, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and Ploughshares. Lia Purpura is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD, and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA Program in Tacoma, WA. Her essay “Autopsy Report” was a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays: 2004, and “Glaciology” was awarded a 2005 Pushcart Prize.
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