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.

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful (Penguin Poets)

Arts & Photography

PURPURA, LIA

History & Criticism

Penguin Publishing Group

Stone Sky Lifting (winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award)

STONE SKY LIFTING (OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Ohio State University Press

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.

Increase

University of Georgia Press

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.

Increase (The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

The Brighter the Veil

Orchises Pr

Literary Nonfiction. Art. "Once you really see a thing...it's hard to unsee," Lia Purpura cautions in an essay that asks us to pay attention to a world abundant with objects. While others may wish to possess these things, consume them, or else throw them away, Purpura chooses to name them, give them history and weight. A tin of mints. A tag on the ear of a cow. A bottle of milk. At the center of SCREAM is Edvard Munch's iconic painting, now reproduced on T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, inflatable dolls, so that the shrieking image loses its rage, becoming nothing more than "mild laughter." But through the lyricism of language, Purpura shows us how the commodified may be returned to lives and landscapes of their own. This chapbook was designed by James Dissette and includes original illustrations by Stuart Cawley.

Scream (or never minding)

Literary House Press

King Baby is a cycle of lyric poems both inspired by and addressed to a found object made animatethen made into a confessorby the poet’s fascination, and by a love that alternates between the familial, obsessive, and devotional.

King Baby

Alice James Books

“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.

On Looking: Essays

Essays & Correspondence

Sarabande Books

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 witnessall 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.

Rough Likeness: Essays

United States

Readers familiar with Lia Purpura's highly praised essay collections―Increase, 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 a Guggenheim, NEA and four Pushcart Prizes, Lia Purpura returns with a collection both sustaining and challenging.

All the Fierce Tethers

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