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    On Looking: Essays
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    On Looking: Essays
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    On Looking: Essays
    Ebook150 pages2 hours

    On Looking: Essays

    By Lia Purpura

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “These pieces are not so much essays as prose poems, lyrical hymns to beauty and aesthetics.” —Publishers Weekly
     
    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 from a recipient of numerous awards for both prose and poetry.
     
    “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
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateAug 1, 2006
    ISBN9781936747214
    Unavailable
    On Looking: Essays
    Author

    Lia Purpura

    LIA PURPURA is the author of seven collections of essays, poems, and translations. Her essay collection On Looking was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other honors include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, three Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in the Best American Essays anthology series. Purpura is a writer in residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and also teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program.

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    Reviews for On Looking

    4.5/5

    11 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.