On Looking: Essays

"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.

Author: Lia Purpura
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 08/01/2006
Pages: 139
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9781932511390


Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Finalist


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/29/2006 pg. 50
Booklist 08/01/2006 pg. 28

About the Author
Purpura's Increase won the 2000 AWP Creative Nonfiction Award. Stone Sky Lifting: Poems, won the 2000 Ohio State/The Journal Award. Also the author of The Brighter the Veil (the Towson University Prize in Literature), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial, translated on a Fulbright in Poland, Purpura teaches at Loyola in Baltimore and at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma.