Rough Likeness: Essays

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.


Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 12/20/2011
ISBN: 9781936747030
Pages: 149
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.60d

Review Citations: Booklist 01/01/2012 pg. 30