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It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

Part of Penguin Poets

Author Lia Purpura
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Paperback
$26.00 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
On sale Sep 29, 2015 | 112 Pages | 9780143126904
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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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Belief

Light being

wavy and particulate

at once

is instructive –

why wouldn’t

other things or states

present as

both/and?

For instance

I both

believe and can’t.

Holding these

together produces

a wobble, I think

it’s time

to take seriously

as a stance.

First Leaf

That yellow

was a falling-off,

a fall

for once I saw

coming –

it could

in its stillness

still be turned from,

. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
© Alan Kolc
Lia Purpura is the author of three collections of poems, The Brighter the Veil, Stone Sky Lifting, and King Baby, and three collections of essays, Increase, Rough Likeness, and On Looking, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Fulbright Fellowships as well as three Pushcart prizes, among other honors. Her work appears frequently in The New Yorker, as well as in The Paris Review, Orion, Agni, Best American Essays and other publications. She is writer in residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. View titles by Lia Purpura

About

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.

Excerpt

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Belief

Light being

wavy and particulate

at once

is instructive –

why wouldn’t

other things or states

present as

both/and?

For instance

I both

believe and can’t.

Holding these

together produces

a wobble, I think

it’s time

to take seriously

as a stance.

First Leaf

That yellow

was a falling-off,

a fall

for once I saw

coming –

it could

in its stillness

still be turned from,

. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

© Alan Kolc
Lia Purpura is the author of three collections of poems, The Brighter the Veil, Stone Sky Lifting, and King Baby, and three collections of essays, Increase, Rough Likeness, and On Looking, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Fulbright Fellowships as well as three Pushcart prizes, among other honors. Her work appears frequently in The New Yorker, as well as in The Paris Review, Orion, Agni, Best American Essays and other publications. She is writer in residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. View titles by Lia Purpura

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