Immagine dell'autore.

Lia Purpura

Autore di On Looking: Essays

9+ opere 154 membri 4 recensioni

Sull'Autore

Lia Purpura is the author of "The Brighter the Veil, Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash," and "Stone Sky Lifting," the 2000 winner of the Ohio State University/The Journal Award in Poetry. She lives in Baltimore, maryland, and teaches at Loyola College. (Bowker Author mostra altro Biography) mostra meno
Fonte dell'immagine: By Slowking4 - Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35425430

Opere di Lia Purpura

On Looking: Essays (2006) 61 copie
Rough Likeness: Essays (2011) 23 copie
All the Fierce Tethers (2019) 23 copie
Increase (2000) 9 copie
King Baby (2008) 8 copie
The Brighter the Veil (1996) 7 copie
Stone Sky Lifting (2000) 5 copie

Opere correlate

The Best American Essays 2011 (2011) — Collaboratore — 225 copie
Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us (2021) — Collaboratore — 61 copie
2011 Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses (2010) — Collaboratore — 39 copie
Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction (2017) — Collaboratore — 8 copie

Etichette

Informazioni generali

Nome canonico
Purpura, Lia
Data di nascita
1964-02-22
Sesso
female
Nazionalità
VS
Luogo di nascita
Mineola, New York, VS
Luogo di residenza
Baltimore, Maryland, VS
Istruzione
Oberlin College
Iowa Writers' Workshop
Attività lavorative
dichter
Organizzazioni
University of Maryland, Baltimore

Utenti

Recensioni

All the Fierce Tethers is a breathtaking collection of personal essays by Lia Purpura. There are twenty essays that illustrate how someone capable of extraordinary insight can travel the galaxy while walking the dog.

The title essay “All the Fierce Tethers” in a few short pages takes us from the particular to the universal in magical ways. She starts by recalling how insignificant we all are in the grand scheme of things, how we live lives that are looping over and over in humdrum repetition like the lives of so many other people. He perspective changes to see how that sameness is a kind of greatness, how the humdrum anchors us to memory, history, and each other. Then she amplifies that idea to consideration of ants, hares, and the vastness of the ecosystems we are heedlessly degrading. “To understand ruin, know first what it is that’s being ruined,” she writes and asks for our investment–using the etymology of that word to ask us “to encounter the holy.”

The first essay “Never Minding” considers how often we turn away from things that make us feel bad and decide not to mind. She writes of how the ubiquity of Munch’s “The Scream” has deracinated it, sucking the life and meaning from it. When despair is a design on a mousepad or coffee mug, commodified and never-minded.

I loved All the Fierce Tethers. Lia Purpura is one of those authors enamored of words. She is one of those people who is struck by words. Take this example, “Come to be held. Hear that? Beheld?—the intensified form, the stand-back-so-as-to-see-the-light version, or angle that promises by holding a thing, I’ll be held by it, that attention swings both ways at once. And what to do with that thought?” She explores words and plays with them, she delights in metaphor but also suggests we can never see an eagle so long as we want it to mean something. We will see its meaning, not its essence.

William Blake wrote about seeing the “world in a grain of sand.” Lia Purpura does that and then she shares it with us shimmering, lambent prose. This is a book to linger over and I did. It is a book you can read aloud just to hear the music in the words. Do not rush through All the Fierce Tethers because there is magic there not to be missed.

All the Fierce Tethers at Sarabande Books
Lia Purpura author site

★★★★★
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/9781946448309/
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
Tonstant.Weader | May 8, 2019 |
When I say I love collections of essays and/or short stories, this is the sort of book I mean. Short pieces of writing that have the author's all put into them; gone over with a fine-tooth comb and polished. Only a handful of pages long each and so satisfying you wish there was more. Writing so good it both inspires and makes you want to give up forever. Phenomenal.
 
Segnalato
alliepascal | 1 altra recensione | Apr 21, 2017 |
I was disappointed. I had previously read Purpura's essay collection On Looking, and was looking for similarly gorgeous writing. This book--the poetry equivalent of a concept album--is kind of quirky and has its moments, but I found it a little contrived and definitely forgettable.
 
Segnalato
Maiasaura | May 16, 2011 |
Gorgeous prose. Purpura writes in the style of the lyric essay--a literary form that is cousin to both the personal essay and the poem. Her writing is smart, beautiful, thought-provoking, and full of heart. She finds beauty in the ugly and the strange in an honest, humanizing way. Not an easy read, but a rewarding one.
 
Segnalato
Maiasaura | 1 altra recensione | May 16, 2011 |

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Statistiche

Opere
9
Opere correlate
6
Utenti
154
Popolarità
#135,795
Voto
3.9
Recensioni
4
ISBN
15

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