On Coming Back as a Buzzard
The Lustres
“Poetry is a Satisfying of the Desire for Resemblance”
Against “Gunmetal”
Street Scene
Being of Two Minds
“Try Our Delicious Pizza”
Augury
There Are Things Awry Here
Jump
Grey
Advice
On Luxury
Remembering
On Tools
Shit’s Beautiful
Memo Re: Beach Glass
Two Experiments and a Coda
$3000 marketing and publicity budget
Advertising in Poets & Writers, Writers Chronicle, and Ninth
Letter
Promotion and publicity through the author's strong academic and
creative writing contacts
Promotion and publicity through author appearances at conferences
and university speaking invitations
Promotion through the author's website (liapurpura.com)
Newsletter and catalog mailing to contacts on Sarabande database as
well as contact provided by Purpura
E-postcard distributed to Purpura's contacts
Internet marketing campaign to include announcement on Sarabande's
national listserve as well as review copy mailing to online
journals and blogs
Lia Purpura is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and translations. Her book of essays, On Looking (Sarabande Books), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In addition, she has earned fellowships and prizes from Pushcart Press, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Program, the Maryland State Arts Council, Loyola University, the MacDowell Colony, the Associated Writing Program (in nonfiction), and Alice James Press (the Beatrice Hawley Award). Her essays and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, AGNI, and The Georgia Review, among others, and were cited five times in Best American Essays. Lia Purpura is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop and is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, MD. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son.
"Lia Purpura's Rough Likeness is all about looking: at a landscape,
at language, at a sign. The truest-looking, though, comes on the
inside, as Purpura goes beneath the surface, writing not just about
what she sees but what it means. 'Rain coming harder,' she writes
in her opening to 'Against 'Gunmetal.' 'Of interest
because rain
alters people in unexpected ways. And the unexpected makes people
so human.
Remember that.'
David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"Purpura (On Looking, 2006) ambushes us again in her second
distinctive, piquant, and vibrantly original essay collection. Her
opening piece, a wise, wry, and provocative tribute to a
much-maligned creature, the buzzard, covertly contains an
enlivening statement of artistic intent that illuminates all that
follows. With a poet’s sensibility and a storyteller’s stride,
Purpura creates essays that heat up like beakers over Bunsen
burners as she boils down the concatenation of experience into
whorled and gleaming words. She is partial to 'the partial''Scraps
and spots, moments and lusters passing and glimpsed sidelong.' She
looks back to her Long Island childhood, paying homage to the
gleaming, rocking sea; remembering how each new word felt radiant,
commodious, and enchanting; and describing her grandmother’s house
and passing trains in a rhapsodic inventory of objects and auras.
Her arresting impressions are fleshed out with avid research, as
Purpura scrutinizes whatever snares her imagination, from the word
gunmetal to the bodily substance we call shit. Fragmentation and
abundance, sadness and splendor, Purpura discerns their meaning and
celebrates their complex beauty."
Donna Seaman, Booklist
"In each of the book's 18 brief pieces, she strives to capture
subjects that seem to defy close study: an adjective, a buzzard,
bits of beach glass, a warning sign. Yet she finds something
insightful to say about each of them, in large part because she's
so careful with words, moving them as close as possible to those
elusive truths."
Mark Athitakis, Star Tribune
Lia Purpura is at the forefront of the New Essay, and this latest
book (her best) takes us much closer into the rough terrain of her
quirky mind than she has ever gone before. The surprises and
insights keep coming. Rough Likeness is an astonishmenta book to
savor, read slowly, smile at, sigh at, and cherish.”
Phillip Lopate
"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
"Lia Purpura's Rough Likeness is all about looking: at a landscape,
at language, at a sign. The truest-looking, though, comes on the
inside, as Purpura goes beneath the surface, writing not just about
what she sees but what it means. 'Rain coming harder,' she writes
in her opening to 'Against 'Gunmetal.' 'Of interest … because rain
alters people in unexpected ways. And the unexpected makes people
so human. … Remember that.'
—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"Purpura (On Looking, 2006) ambushes us again in her second
distinctive, piquant, and vibrantly original essay collection. Her
opening piece, a wise, wry, and provocative tribute to a
much-maligned creature, the buzzard, covertly contains an
enlivening statement of artistic intent that illuminates all that
follows. With a poet’s sensibility and a storyteller’s stride,
Purpura creates essays that heat up like beakers over Bunsen
burners as she boils down the concatenation of experience into
whorled and gleaming words. She is partial to 'the partial'—'Scraps
and spots, moments and lusters passing and glimpsed sidelong.' She
looks back to her Long Island childhood, paying homage to the
gleaming, rocking sea; remembering how each new word felt radiant,
commodious, and enchanting; and describing her grandmother’s house
and passing trains in a rhapsodic inventory of objects and auras.
Her arresting impressions are fleshed out with avid research, as
Purpura scrutinizes whatever snares her imagination, from the word
gunmetal to the bodily substance we call shit. Fragmentation and
abundance, sadness and splendor, Purpura discerns their meaning and
celebrates their complex beauty."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
"In each of the book's 18 brief pieces, she strives to capture
subjects that seem to defy close study: an adjective, a buzzard,
bits of beach glass, a warning sign. Yet she finds something
insightful to say about each of them, in large part because she's
so careful with words, moving them as close as possible to those
elusive truths."
—Mark Athitakis, Star Tribune
“Lia Purpura is at the forefront of the New Essay, and this latest
book (her best) takes us much closer into the rough terrain of her
quirky mind than she has ever gone before. The surprises and
insights keep coming. Rough Likeness is an astonishment—a book to
savor, read slowly, smile at, sigh at, and cherish.”
—Phillip Lopate
"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
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