Rough Likeness
Essays
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 witness--all 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.
Lia Purpura is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and translations. Her book of essays, On Looking (Sarabande Books), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In addition, she has earned fellowships and prizes from Pushcart Press, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Program, the Maryland State Arts Council, Loyola University, the MacDowell Colony, the Associated Writing Program (in nonfiction), and Alice James Press (the Beatrice Hawley Award). Her essays and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, AGNI, and The Georgia Review, among others, and were cited five times in Best American Essays. Lia Purpura is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop and is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, MD. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son.
