It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this striking display of minimalist form and content, Purpura (King Baby) employs small and quiet moments to construct a philosophy that embraces the natural world as well as the ambiguities of language and meaning. This minimalism is evident in repeated expressions of antimaterialism and calls for a simplification of life, as in "Natural Disaster," which sees the poet offer the optimistic notion that "Maybe being closer/ to nothing/ makes stuff/ not matter so much." Other poems, such as "Devices," long for a mythic past in which people relied on the outer and inner worlds for enrichment. Purpura's mystical wonder produces astutely articulated observations, as in "Loud Walk in Fall": "There is something else/ noise hurts./ Not just me./ Flinching abounds/ in the open air." The poet's continual insistence on duality or even multiplicity of interpretation can be seen in "Storm Targets Midwest," a headline appearing in a poem that becomes a meditation on volition, as if "the sky chose/ them and not us," punctuated with the declaration "That's one way to ride/ the day's events/ into meaning." With an eye for detail and a reverential approach to nature providing plenty of stunning imagery, Purpura deftly distills existential issues to their essence and prompts readers to engage in their own contemplations of her themes.
