It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 09/29/2015
ISBN: 9780143126904
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.20d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 09/21/2015
Library Journal 11/15/2015 pg. 91