PDF On Looking Essays Lia Purpura Books
Download As PDF : On Looking Essays Lia Purpura 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.
PDF On Looking Essays Lia Purpura Books
"This is very different from what I'm used to reading (I don't typically buy essay collections). I would say it's not really for the faint of heart, the first essay is an examination of autopsies, a pretty stark intro. Occasionally, I feel like I don't fully understand the connections between various subjects but then again, the essays probably deserve a second reading so maybe it'll be clearer the second time around. The best one is "Sugar Eggs: A Reverie". In the first few paragraphs I wasn't especially interested, but stuck with it. After a few minutes it almost felt entrancing, to the point that I felt very disappointed when the piece had to end (just read it and you'll see why). That essay alone is worth the cost of the whole book."
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On Looking Essays Lia Purpura Books Reviews :
On Looking Essays Lia Purpura Books Reviews
- Purpura’s experience as a poet is obvious—I would say it is as much prose poetry as essays. The theme of sight is beautiful. Throughout the book, it comes in and out of focus but I think that helps strengthen the connection to the theme. The same goes for many of the individual essays. They are complicated and take a few readings to tease out the purpose and the meaning. However, I feel like this too adds to the full theme of looking. Seeing is passive but looking is active. As a reader of Purpura, one cannot just sit back and wait for the text to open up. One needs to search and dig to find meaning and to understand. Take, for example, “Sugar Eggs A Reverie.†The essay seems to be a compilation of disjointed images that come together in the context of sugar eggs and the realities they encapsulate. Though this meaning is implied by the title of the essay, the reader needs to keep a watchful eye, carefully piecing each image together to see the big picture. My personal favorite essay was “The Smallest Woman in the World.†This specific essay considers the reasons we look at people and the things we see. Upon looking, the speaker realizes the titular woman is “small-because-hurt†and not “little-pal†small. Sometimes, we need to look because we don’t want to see what is there. And I think that is as important as looking because of beauty. By intentionally obscuring and selectively revealing what we need to see, Purpura creates a masterwork, a read that is transcendent for the reader.
- This is very different from what I'm used to reading (I don't typically buy essay collections). I would say it's not really for the faint of heart, the first essay is an examination of autopsies, a pretty stark intro. Occasionally, I feel like I don't fully understand the connections between various subjects but then again, the essays probably deserve a second reading so maybe it'll be clearer the second time around. The best one is "Sugar Eggs A Reverie". In the first few paragraphs I wasn't especially interested, but stuck with it. After a few minutes it almost felt entrancing, to the point that I felt very disappointed when the piece had to end (just read it and you'll see why). That essay alone is worth the cost of the whole book.
- Purpura's collected essays, "On Looking," is absolute beauty. The way she creates images through words, highlighting unseen details--this is a must read. As other reviews have pointed out, "Autopsy Report" starts the collection out with a series of abrupt and painfully revealing glimpses of the human body. The stark, honest images don't end there, either, and in a powerful way Purpura guides the reader through a lesson on humans, on existence--on looking. My favorites include "On Aesthetics," "On Form," "Brown," "The Pin," "Red An invocation," and man...the entire book really. With "On Looking," Purpura offers a strong and unique example of what the nonfiction essay can be.
- Like magic.
- More a collection of loosely stitched musings than a coherent narrative about the pleasure and pain of paying attention to the particulars of life. Close attention. Poetic attention. Sign up for the lyrical ride and you won't be disappointed.
- If you like Lydia Davis you'll love Lia Purpura.
- exactly as stated... Work well will buy from this seller again
- Purpura's writing is not for everyone, as her images affront the reader with simultaneous disgust and beauty. Her sentences are crafted to be inevitable--so perfectly crafted that there is no useless word or sound or extraneous sentences. On Looking is in line with other collections of essays on seeing/sight (I am thinking of Sontag's On Photography or Barthes' Camera Lucida), but taking a less direct, but equally beautiful and formally exquisite, approach to the subject. Individually, though, the essays may not appear to be "on looking," and thus can be taken as essays exploring just the occasions that spawn them. Ultimately, a beautiful, ravishing, daring collection written by one of the most important essayists writing today.
