Description

Penguin, paperback

Publication Date: September 29, 2015

Publisher Marketing: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.