{"title":"Lia Purpura","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"on-looking-book-lia-purpura-9781932511390","title":"On Looking","description":"Purpura's beautifully wrought second collection of lyric essays, addressing the ethics and aesthetics of seeing.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49948991160593,"sku":"CIN1932511393G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51055164621073,"sku":"NIN9781932511390","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52486839402769,"sku":"NLS9781932511390","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52629462122769,"sku":"CIN1932511393VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53548520636689,"sku":"CIN1932511393A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1932511393.jpg?v=1751092941"},{"product_id":"it-shouldn-t-have-been-beautiful-book-lia-purpura-9780143126904","title":"It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful","description":"\u003cb\u003eA powerful new collection from poet, essayist, and frequent \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e contributor Lia Purpura\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50288701931793,"sku":"CIN0143126903VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50815570084113,"sku":"GOR014084298","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999506600209,"sku":"NIN9780143126904","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0143126903.jpg?v=1751438559"},{"product_id":"increase-book-lia-purpura-9780820322322","title":"Increase","description":"This is Lia Purpura's chronicle of her pregnancy, the birth of her son, Joseph, and the first year of his life. She recounts her journey with the heightened awareness of a mother-to-be and through the eyes of a poet.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50370916614417,"sku":"CIN0820322326G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50370920775953,"sku":"CIN0820322326VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0820322326.jpg?v=1750746328"},{"product_id":"all-the-fierce-tethers-book-lia-purpura-9781946448309","title":"All the Fierce Tethers","description":"Readers familiar with Lia Purpura's highly praised essay collections--Increase, On Looking, and Rough Likeness--will know she's a master of observation, a writer obsessed with the interplay between humans and the things they see. The subject matter of All the Fierce Tethers is wonderfully varied, both low (muskrats, slugs, a stained quilt in a motel room) and lofty (shadows, prayer, the idea of beauty). In Treatise Against Irony, she counters this all-too modern affliction with ferocious optimism and intelligence: The opposite of irony is nakedness. In My Eagles, our nation's symbol is viewed from all angles--nesting, flying, politicized, preserved. The essay in itself could be a small anthology. And, in a fresh move, Purpura turns to her own, racially divided Baltimore neighborhood, where a blood stain appears on a street separating East (with its Value Village) and West (with its community garden). Finalist for the National Book Critics Award, winner of the Pushcart Prize, Lia Purpura returns with a collection both sustaining and challenging.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50402372845841,"sku":"CIN1946448303G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51058360058129,"sku":"NIN9781946448309","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52480136577297,"sku":"NLS9781946448309","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1946448303.jpg?v=1751219274"},{"product_id":"rough-likeness-book-lia-purpura-9781936747030","title":"Rough Likeness","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50943541149969,"sku":"CIN1936747030VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51054853783825,"sku":"NIN9781936747030","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51440963387665,"sku":"GOR014282544","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51742868439313,"sku":"CIN1936747030G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52486347718929,"sku":"NLS9781936747030","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1936747030.jpg?v=1750996990"},{"product_id":"stone-sky-lifting-book-lia-purpura-9780814250655","title":"Stone Sky Lifting","description":"Stone Sky Lifting is a study in states of extremity, portraying violence at one end of the spectrum and unbidden solace at the other. Focusing on transforming events, Purpura depicts the spiritual dislocation that can result from abiding scrutiny.\u003cp\u003eWith a metaphysical sensibility, Purpura moves between our world's abundance and its mysterious stillness in her subject matter. Over the course of the book, a shaken vision emerges -- one of trespass, both worldly and spiritual, and of repair. The poems in this collection don't seek resolve; rather, they make space for paradox to root. Silences become revelations in Purpura's poems.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008088539409,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008092963089,"sku":"NIN9780814250655","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52665888932113,"sku":"NLS9780814250655","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814250653.jpg?v=1750882790"},{"product_id":"king-baby-book-lia-purpura-9781882295685","title":"King Baby","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"'The story of your creation starts\/with a force that wanted something,' Lia Purpura writes, 'and worked to see if you were it.' A myth of motherhood, a parable of artistic creation, a suite of hymns to an ambiguous emblem, this compelling, Orphic sequence pushes deeply into its chosen vehicle, seeking the diff erence between song and hunger.\"--Mark Doty\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"Purpura's charming [third collection]...captures both the fierce love and the flighty weirdness of life with a baby, opting always for the symbolic and the surprising over the literal record...\"--Publishers Weekly\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"This book-length sequence is reminiscent of poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, with its hypnotic voice and its otherworldly reach.\"--Library Journal\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"In King Baby...Purpura uses the physical as a conduit to the metaphysical; and circles this found fetish in ever-more-incisive gyres, to probe the never-satisfied nature of human yearning...She is particularly effective at distilling those elusive slithers of creative clarity we sometimes experience in our daily lives...Purpura is a wordsmith of the highest order...\"--Susan McCallum-Smith, WYPR Radio\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"The poems are exquisitely tender and reverent, each temporarily holding emptiness in place with images and stories, each looking for something that can stand for holiness.\"--ForeWord Magazine\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"The poems in King Baby are both folk tales and found objects: every line reaches the page like Pushkin's talking goldfish. A child's discovery of a hand-carved totem frees Purpura from the daily rounds of semiotics. Like the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof's work, every poem in this collection reminds us that we are each still newly placed among the living.\"--Stephen Kuusisto\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51157818605841,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51157819719953,"sku":"NIN9781882295685","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1882295684.jpg?v=1751347677"},{"product_id":"increase-book-lia-purpura-9780820348407","title":"Increase","description":"This is Lia Purpura's chronicle of her pregnancy, the birth of her son, Joseph, and the first year of his life. 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