Rough Likeness

Praise for Lia Purpura: "Lia Purpura is fierce. She creates a kind of word origami, folding phonemes and inquiries into intricate paper delights. Then she holds a magnifying glass over them, focusing her rapturous attentions through the lens, until twists of smoke appear, and geometries of flame and sparks rain. If language is, as she suggests in one essay, 'a game we all [agree] to play,' then Purpura is at once a master of the game and a soulful, wild playmate."--Leah Hager Cohen "Purpura's sense of the intricate rhythms of language, her carefully constructed imagery, her leaps of association and symbols all recall the language of a poet. Her seductive, confessional voice, her need to be plain about her own experiences as a mother, a writer, and an observer of the world call to mind the works of the memoirist. And her finely tuned critical mind . . . suggest[s] the work of the critic and aesthetic philospher. . . . In these essays, Lia Purpura brings a nuanced, highly intelligent, critical eye to our most casual moments of perception."--Kevin Prufer, Critical Mass In Rough Likeness, the follow-up to the National Book Critics Circle finalist On Looking, Lia Purpura's essays take a conversational turn to examine the smallest things imaginable--beach glass, the color "gunmetal," a mushroom--as well as states of being. Czeslaw Milosz said, "nothing but gifts on this poor, poor earth," and Purpura, in her excursions, finds worlds in the minute, crafting monuments to sentience.