On Looking: Essays

by Lia Purpura

“Purpura is the real deal, and so is every successive sentence in this collection. A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult witnessing. . . .”—Albert Goldbarth

“Purpura's prose is a system of delicate shocks—leaps and connections and syncopated revelations, all in the service of the spirit negotiating the truth of its experience.”—Sven Birkerts

Lia Purpura's daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura's hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson's words: "I like the silent church before the sermon begins."

In "Autopsy Report," Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our bodies after death, examining the "dripping fruits" of organs and the spine in its "wet, red earth." A similar reverence is held for the alien jellyfish in "On Form," where she notes that "in order to see their particular beauty...we have to suspend our fear, we have to love contradiction." Her essays question art and its responses as well as its responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing and the sensual. 

Above all, Purpura's essays are a call to notice. She is writer-as-telescope, kaleidoscope, microscope, and mirror.  As she says: "By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare." This is, indeed, a rare and startling treasure of a book.

Lia Purpura is the author of Increase (essays), Stone Sky Lifting (poems), The Brighter the Veil (poems), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (translations). Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Agni, DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program in Tacoma, Washington.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir, Philosophy, Art, School

139 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2006

About the author

Lia Purpura (born February 22, 1964, Mineola, New York) is an American poet, writer and educator.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Carolyn Jacobson]

This book got me thinking a lot about fragments, since almost all of the essay consist of fragments. In some essays, each paragraph is set apart; in others, several paragraphs serve as subsections. Is this a cop-out? I can't tell. I use fragments a lot, too, and often it's a cop-out on my part--a way to avoid thinking through the connections between things. I know it's there somewhere, but it's easier just to leave both things hovering next to each other and let the listeners work it out themselves.

Maybe that's too harsh, though. There's something to be said for the indeterminacy of fragments. And it's a way of forcing the listener or reader to be more active. (Thanks, eb, for reminding me of these things . . .) Maybe it was the effect of an entire book using this strategy that raised my eyebrow.

In terms of the subject matter, this book was right up my alley. At a certain point, I knew there'd be a reference to the Mutter Museum somewhere. And there it was, on pg. 127.

I think these essays might be better suited as individual pieces in magazines or journals. Seeing them all together made some of the strategies seem repetitive (like withholding the actual subject of the essay and giving out hints only gradually).

But I did like this and it made me want to write.

[Andy Stallings · Rating 3 out of 5]

The language is almost (no: is) irritating in its consciously beautiful construction. Which does not negate the fact that it is beautiful, but does diminish my pleasure.

Makes me wonder whether there is a point at which self-awareness becomes a detriment. As a narrative strategy, definitely.

Nevertheless, I don't mean to speak much harshly about this book. The essays are (mostly) woven delicately, and bring the world to sharp focus around Purpura's shifting center within observation of it.

Not likely to re-read.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

My formal review, which was published back in 2008, is lost somewhere in cyberspace (and yes, I've tried the "Wayback Machine") or is stuck on an inaccessible hard drive. In any case, I did find a bit of it: "I think of On Looking, Lia Purpura’s collection of essays about perception, being, self-apprehension, object recognition, and words, words, words, as a whirling dynamo of currents and pulses. Its startling lyricism, its dripping lushness, its frothing sensuousness, and its fascination with minutiae—with the universes contained within a speck, a thing, a breath, a jot, an interval, a space, a vacuum..." In other words, this is an astonishing collection of essays, and after a second reading, it still surprises, language- and form-wise; and it stands—and I say this unabashedly and without exaggeration—as one of the greatest essay collections ever written.

[Amarachi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful to read but frustrating to understand

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Purpura’s collection of essays revolves around the theme of seeing things in a new way. It’s about perception, awareness. She looks at various things. Dead bodies. Vulnerability. Deformities. Patterns. Color. Space. Objects. A fox, briefly. A small woman and others on display. Reaction to a killer on the loose. Things framed in a window, and dying. Ruins. Deposition. A rooftop view. A snake. Praise. A dead horsefly. Things you don’t want to see. And as she looks closely at these things, inviting the reader to look at them too, she sees beyond them, and opens up the world to her reader too. I think she wants us to look closely because such sight, or insight, is life-giving. “Being watched,” she writes, “is something like being remade” (Kindle Location 1285).

We are given hints at things that happen in each essay, but would be hard pressed to summarize any plot. But what each essay is about is far less important that how it’s told. As Purpura herself says, “A poem should not mean, but be” (Kindle Location 325). And this book, in my opinion, is a poem as much as it is prose. Choosing to place so much emphasis on word choice shows the author’s desire to slow the reader down so we might enjoy the language. Consider, for example, the opening sequence: “I shall begin with the chests of drowned men, bound with ropes and diesel-slicked. Their ears sludge-filled. Their legs mud-smeared. Asleep below deck when a freighter hit and the river rose inside their tug. Their lashes white with river silt” (Kindle Locations 43-45). The title (“Autopsy Report”) is hardworking and clues the reader in to who Purpura is talking about in this essay, and she uses other clues as well; but she does not use straight prose to explain that she is viewing dead bodies. That would defeat the purpose. As another reviewer says, “Its startling lyricism, its dripping lushness, its frothing sensuousness, and its fascination with minutiae-with the universes contained within a speck, a thing, a breath, a jot, an interval, a space, a vacuum-travels a razor's edge between instability and fragmentation on one side and cohesion and wholeness on the other” (http://www.sarabandebooks.org/?page_i...). In other words, the method (lyricism itself) is also the desired outcome.

The author, in the interest of lyricism, used such tools as fragments, segments, digression, and imagery more than she depends on narrative techniques. There are some stories and characters, but the scenes primarily support her reflective thoughts, not vice versa.

This kind of cerebral writing demands close attention, making it difficult to read and nearly impossible to decipher. Take this paragraph, for example: “A goldfinch flies up while leaves, gold and russety, sift and fall. A flight up, a flight down, the very air marked, so both rising and falling are held in a furor of sunstruck ongoingness” (Kindle Locations 866-867). We have a hint this is about fear and even what causes the author to fear, but ultimately our interpretation doesn’t matter. The lyric essay demands the reader to enter in, to contribute her personal interpretation, to respond not with analysis but emotion.

[Bonita Jewel · Rating 3 out of 5]

High points: This author is a precise wordsmith, yet her work is also lyrical, as if weaving some loosely connected work of words and concepts. These essays reveal a glimpse into a sharp, penetrating, and fearless mind.
Low points: Several essays in this collection focus on macabre details, understandable if these were experiences that the author personally dealt with, but they aren't. It is as if she has chosen to draw out and set her gaze upon the morbidity of life, going so far as to visit a series of autopsies simply for the sake of writing about it. Comes across as wanton, disregarding, in some respects of life and its sacredness.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love, love, love.

[Jamie Grefe · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not enough to say that Lia Purpura's work holds influence over my own, that her essays are like perfect windows or mirrors held up to the sky. No. My words are not enough.

[Simon Stegall · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't finish this one. I have nothing against the lyric essay in particular, but Purpura's style is so overly lyrical it verges on incoherence. She uses images and splintered concepts to evoke a poetic aesthetic, but there is little control or content underneath the flowery language. If these essays were poems I think I would have been more inclined to like them, but as essays I thought they were corny and boring.

Purpura's main conceit is suggested by the title: On Looking. The notion of seeing quotidian things in a new way is an old essayistic trope; but Purpura does more "looking" than seeing. After reading a few of her essays, I wasn't convinced that she saw things in a new way. She slaps misty and saccharine poeticisms onto things and labels it "lyric" and "looking" but it's just bad poetry.

I want to qualify this by saying that I love obscure and splintered poetry- Eliot and Auden are classic examples of seemingly incoherent poets that are actually well worth laboring over. I also love lyrical essayists like Dillard and Soyinka. But Purpura's book, in my opinion, is not a good specimen of this genre.

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

wildly perceptive and poetic descriptions of bodies and leaves and windows and photographs and people and holes. i liked these essays the most when lia inserted herself more into them, as this is a book about her - and her set of eyes and the way her brain interprets our world that is merely a collage of different colors and shapes. painful imagery, looking at, looking away, unable to see or touch, the invisible body, the seen body. through a child's eyes, the confusion and obsession with this type of pain - the "i can't stop thinking about her and i don't know why" pain. when we really look at someone, our whole world splits open. we become two halves - us before we looked, and us now, stained with what we saw.

[readwithmi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was hooked on the concept of a book that deals with "the aesthetics and ethics of seeing," and was even more entranced by the way every word was so beautifully strung together. On Looking exposed me to new ways of viewing and experiencing.

[Lorenzo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wrote a review. It was my first one for goodreads. It was considered. It was long. I liked it.

I accidentally deleted the review. In one fell swipe.

I’m sad now. I don’t think I have it in me to write it again.

(I need coffee…)

[Elisabeth Moss]

I appreciated the essay format, and there is some beautiful witting in this. But often the fragments that Purpura present don’t come together in the end, at least for me, and leave me confused and unaffected.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

INTENSE! My first taste of the lyric essay. I was confounded, but I stayed with her. Definitely a book that teaches writers to write. 💙

[Rich · Rating 1 out of 5]

I chose to move on - it’s all a bit too twee

[Kat Dixon · Rating 5 out of 5]

a stunner

2-Minute Tuesday Reads: On Looking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EycgW...

[Sarah Giragosian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is required reading for anyone who writes poetry or is any kind of visual artist. I'm determined now to read everything that Purpura has written.

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting and worth a reread, this collection by Purpura (MFA Rainier Workshop, Tacoma, Washington).

[philomela · Rating 3 out of 5]

at every turn of a page i wished she would just shut her mouth

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lia Purpura’s “On Looking” is a book that defies categorization. In it, she puts forth daring ideas, suggests, questions, prods, brings things out to be examined, examines them with depth, both in language and emotion, and transfigures her observations into vivid and vibrant prose--real, earthy poetry, without a hint of stale poetic form in sight. Lia has an ability to be with the chaos of language, without striving too hard to control it, and thus, her writing travels effortlessly to rare, unpredictable, unexpected, heights.

“On Looking” explores our desires to have reality as we wish it to be, to fill in blanks around us that our minds cannot, given the limits we naturally are subject to. If we're lucky, we get to experience the shock of a differing perspective. Throughout the book, Lia's prose subtly alters the language and shows us the multitude of aspects contained within the altered objects we encounter, and how what we think we are experiencing, can often only be discovered much later.

She asks us to allow the overall picture to develop, slowly, inexorably. As readers, indeed in life, many of us are impatient to “get to the point, get to the end.” One of the things that “On Looking” does so well is parry that urge. At the same time there are perfectly honed extended sections-- explorations--that allow us to witness Lia make connections, truly turn things over and over, and come to know them as fully as possible.

At one point she writes “...yesterday morning, settling in with the dictionary to find some new words...” From that image of comfort, we get that there's a palpable thirst for knowledge, which makes finally arriving feel complete. Elsewhere, we get an idea of Lia's comfort with not knowing, with not grasping too soon for easy answers; which makes her writing, and what it communicates, so powerful.

No matter how “slant” the book may seem, we are also, through the deep, emotional force of Lia's words, never allowed to forget that “On Looking's” explorations are rooted in the real, in getting at truth. A person compelled to unflinchingly witness what is around her; to actually engage the world, no matter how painful the interaction might be, ferociously dedicated to understanding it better, more deeply.

She writes at one point about encountering the British game “similes.” She writes of it as “a game for those who like playing by the rules, slipping into, not standing back from.” “On Looking” is a book that simply blasts away the rules, and by so doing, creates something truly new, something indelible. Not matter how you look at it.

[Jessie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today I am made a little different in my vision by this book, scrambling to prepare to discuss the second half with my students. Purpura gets too elusive and cerebral for me at times and I frown while reading, thinking she’s trying to force the emotion of a juxtaposition on us, but then… something does open… I am moved -- kind of moved to a different place and I wonder, Now how did that happen when I was so often getting frustrated by the overwrought or self-conscious sentences? Mysterious. Typed out several sentences to examine with my class (see below) -- not sure I'll use the book again, but I consider my mind blown and I feel lucky to be talking with my students about these pages today:

“The elements mingle, brick by brick (though the sensation is softer and welling) and add up to this moment, a seep and twining that constitute now.” (69)

“And all this I call fall, I call late afternoon, will come back, will come hauling its wedge of cold fear, its unbidden relief, oh who can know which, some long summer hour when lines of road tar loosen in heat, a boy sits idly peeling a stick, and wood wasps drill slow, perfect circles in eaves.” (74)

“But I wanted distance to unscroll my sight, for the grasses’ bright tips to draw my eye out, far, to that jittery open.” (77)

“There’s phlox out there, opening between one black and another black, hanging branch of an apple tree—the very tree that holds the bird that bends the air so parenthetically around itself, and its song around anything listening.” (80-81)

“The hole was deep, and the blood hadn’t slipped in runnels all over but dried black at the rim.” (121)

“All the specimens: a loud carbuncle in the plaster, on the back of a neck, like a scream.” (128)

[Andi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I read books and think - dog-gone-it, I was thinking the same thing; I should have written that down before she did. Sometimes I read books and think - wow, I never would have thought of that. Today, when I finished Lia Purpura's On Looking I thought - Whew! I thought of some of those things, but boy am I glad she wrote them down instead of me.

Purpura's grasp of observation is stunning - she notices the way animals are beautifully crushed by cars, how plastic grocery bags caught on a breeze resemble marine egg sacs, the recurrence of a safety pin lying forgotten on a lawn. And then she takes these observed things and weaves them, bending metal and idea, leaf and thought, into lovely lyrical essays that remind us what it means to live with loss, and hope, and invisibility, and language.

Like no other book I've ever read, Purpura's essays make me want to be a better writer. I hope they do the same for you.

On Looking: Essays by Lia Purpura [image error]


For more of my book reviews, visit www.andilit.com.

[Chelsea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lia Purpura's collection of lyrical essays, On Looking, is compelling in its attention to how we view the world and how we internalize that sight, that observation. In the first essay, "Autopsy Report," we are immediately swallowed into Purpura's uncanny ability to make something as desperate as viewing a group of cadavers into something surprising and beautiful. In many ways, this first essay prepares us for the rest of the collection. Most poignantly when she writes, "If looking, though, is a practice, a form of attention paid, which is, for many, the essence of prayer, it is the sole practice I had available to me as a child. By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare" (6-7). Throughout the collection, Pupura explores these relationships in a series of vignettes using language that is as near to poetry as prose ever hopes to be. She invites the universe into the body, grapples with its presence there, and makes known that we are not as disconnected from it as we may sometimes feel. A lovely read to take an essay at a time so as to truly absorb and appreciate its beauty.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like what the back cover has to say (surprisingly) about Purpura. She is indeed "writer-as-telescope, kaleidoscope, microscope, and mirror." It is a pleasure simply to revel in her language, which is so alive and moving. And though there are a few moments here and there that, to me, feel a bit thin in terms of meaning-making, the observations throughout which deeply moved me or troubled me far outweighed those that missed the mark. Purpura's musings on aestheticism, on freak shows, on war memorials, on the phrase "wouldn't hurt a fly," on windows and framing, and of course on the nature of turning toward and turning from, are unforgettable.

[lia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essays about looking at things, what more would I like than that? Quiet and dreamy, unattached and perhaps even detached--the ability to look at things that are hard to look at, and still appreciate the beauty and mystery that surrounds us. Sometimes, it feels a little too poetic and somehow, too 'written' if that makes any sense, but I think it may just be that this book should be read in small doses, and not all in one bite. Not for those who would be upset reading about dead people & animals.

[Tina Schumann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked up a copy at AWP and I cannot put it down. The essay titled "Autopsy Report" alone makes it worth picking up. Purpura has a unique eye and an investigators perspective on the world. Her curiosity is infectious, but it is really her brilliant use of language, her route to expression that keeps me hooked; lyrical, experimental, at times surreal, but she always brings you back to concrete human bounds and the things of this world that make us human. She's a rare bird. I hope she's working on "On Looking; The Sequel."

[Rachel Swearingen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Startling and gorgeous on so many levels. What's that word for already missing what you know will one day part? That's the way she looks at the body, her newborn child, the melting ice, the process of art-making--always seeing the past dissolving into the future and vice-versa. These lyric essays are like long prose poems, but the lyrical quality doesn't lull. To be enjoyed on a long, slow rainy day.

[Kristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

The lyrical language in this book is stunning. I want to keep reading it again and again. "Coming To See" is my favorite of the essays, though that is hard to say because I love them all. "Coming To See" is written in subtitled sections and I am fascinated by this form. How do writers pull this off? And Purpura does it seamlessly...somehow...

[Lia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most talented writer I have ever encountered. "On Looking" is a book of Purpura's lyric essays. All meditate on the act of observing. Never have I loved sentences so much. For example, take this sentence from the essay 'Autopsy Report': "His ribs like steppes, ice-shelves, sandstone." Just pure poetic genius.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of the eighteen essays in this collection, I only liked two: "Autopsy Report" and "The Space Between." The other essays felt too contrived somehow. I've also read her more recent collection of essays, Rough Likeness, and felt they were much stronger. I do like how she is pushing the boundaries of the 'open' or new-form (or whatever people wish to call it) essay.