Lia Purpura's Books

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

By: Lia Purpura

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It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

By: Lia Purpura

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.

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Page Count

114

Publisher

Penguin Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0143126903

ISBN 13

9780143126904

Increase

By: Lia Purpura

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Increase

By: Lia Purpura

Increase is Lia Purpura’s chronicle of her pregnancy, the birth of her son, Joseph, and the first year of his life. She recounts her journey with the heightened awareness of a mother-to-be and through the eyes of a poet, from the moment she confirms her pregnancy as “A blue X slowly crosses itself, first one arm, then the other in the small white window of the test,” through “the X of his crossed feet in sleep” as her child’s world begins. Purpura’s sensibility transcends the facts of personal experience to enfold the dramatically changing shape of a larger, complex world. These closely knit essays portray the rhythms of a new mother’s life as it is challenged and transformed in nearly every aspect, from the emotions of wildness, loss, need, and desire to the outward progress—and interruption—of her work and activities. Increase offers us motherhood at an extraordinary pitch, recording, absorbing, and revisiting experiences from a multitude of angles. Purpura presents her story of discovery with unequaled eloquence, grace, and power.

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Page Count

152

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820348627

ISBN 13

9780820348629

Rough Likeness

Essays

By: Lia Purpura

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Rough Likeness

Essays

By: Lia Purpura

“All about looking: at a landscape, at language, at a sign . . . Purpura goes beneath the surface, writing not just about what she sees but what it means.” —Los Angeles Times 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. “Lia Purpura is at the forefront of the New Essay, and this latest book (her best) takes us much closer into the rough terrain of her quirky mind than she has ever gone before. The surprises and insights keep coming. Rough Likeness is an astonishment—a book to savor, read slowly, smile at, sigh at, and cherish.” —Phillip Lopate

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Page Count

141

Publisher

Sarabande Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1936747340

ISBN 13

9781936747344

On Looking

Essays

By: Lia Purpura

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On Looking

Essays

By: Lia Purpura

Purpura's beautifully wrought second collection of lyric essays, addressing the ethics and aesthetics of seeing.

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Page Count

154

Publisher

Sarabande Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1932511393

ISBN 13

9781932511390

All the Fierce Tethers

By: Lia Purpura

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All the Fierce Tethers

By: Lia Purpura

Readers familiar with Lia Purpura’s highly praised essay collections—Becoming, On Looking, and Rough Likeness—will know she’s a master of observation, a writer obsessed with the interplay between humans and the things they see. The subject matter of All the Fierce Tethers is wonderfully varied, both low (muskrats, slugs, a stained quilt in a motel room) and lofty (shadows, prayer, the idea of beauty). In “Treatise Against Irony,” she counters this all-too modern affliction with ferocious optimism and intelligence: “The opposite of irony is nakedness.” In “My Eagles,” our nation’s symbol is viewed from all angles—nesting, flying, politicized, preserved. The essay in itself could be a small anthology. And, in a fresh move, Purpura turns to her own, racially divided Baltimore neighborhood, where a blood stain appears on a street separating East (with its Value Village) and West (with its community garden). Finalist for the National Book Critics Award, winner of the Pushcart Prize, Lia Purpura returns with a collection both sustaining and challenging.

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Publisher

Sarabande Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1946448311

ISBN 13

9781946448316

Rough Likeness

Essays

By: Lia Purpura

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Rough Likeness

Essays

By: Lia Purpura

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

141

Publisher

Sarabande Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1936747340

ISBN 13

9781936747344

On Looking

Essays

By: Lia Purpura

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On Looking

Essays

By: Lia Purpura

Purpura's beautifully wrought second collection of lyric essays, addressing the ethics and aesthetics of seeing.

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

154

Publisher

Sarabande Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1932511393

ISBN 13

9781932511390

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

By: Lia Purpura

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It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

By: Lia Purpura

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Page Count

114

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0698183320

ISBN 13

9780698183322

Increase

By: Lia Purpura

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Increase

By: Lia Purpura

Increase is Lia Purpura’s chronicle of her pregnancy, the birth of her son, Joseph, and the first year of his life. She recounts her journey with the heightened awareness of a mother-to-be and through the eyes of a poet, from the moment she confirms her pregnancy as “A blue X slowly crosses itself, first one arm, then the other in the small white window of the test,” through “the X of his crossed feet in sleep” as her child’s world begins. Purpura’s sensibility transcends the facts of personal experience to enfold the dramatically changing shape of a larger, complex world. These closely knit essays portray the rhythms of a new mother’s life as it is challenged and transformed in nearly every aspect, from the emotions of wildness, loss, need, and desire to the outward progress--and interruption--of her work and activities. Increase offers us motherhood at an extraordinary pitch, recording, absorbing, and revisiting experiences from a multitude of angles. Purpura presents her story of discovery with unequaled eloquence, grace, and power.

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Page Count

152

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820348406

ISBN 13

9780820348407

All the Fierce Tethers

By: Lia Purpura

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All the Fierce Tethers

By: Lia Purpura

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Sarabande Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1946448311

ISBN 13

9781946448316

Ecstasia

By: Francesca Lia Block

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Ecstasia

By: Francesca Lia Block

Calliope forms Ecstasia, a rock band, with her brother, Rafe, but a series of visions compels her to leave the group and journey to Under, where the Old Ones went to die and where her parents disappeared

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Age

Page Count

183

Publisher

ROC Trade

Published Date

ISBN 10

0451452607

ISBN 13

9780451452603

Book's by Lia Purpura

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

Increase

Increase

Rough Likeness

Rough Likeness

On Looking

On Looking

All the Fierce Tethers

All the Fierce Tethers

Rough Likeness

Rough Likeness

On Looking

On Looking

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

Increase

Increase

All the Fierce Tethers

All the Fierce Tethers

Ecstasia

Ecstasia

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