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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. With 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.
Family circumstances force siblings Ying and Lai Yue to flee their home in China to seek their fortunes in Australia. Life on the gold fields is hard, and they soon abandon the diggings and head to nearby Maytown. Once there, Lai Yue gets a job as a carrier on an overland expedition, while Ying finds work in a local store and strikes up a friendship with Meriem, a young white woman with her own troubled past. When a serious crime is committed, suspicion falls on all those who are considered outsiders. Evoking the rich, unfolding tapestry of Australian life in the late nineteenth century, Stone Sky Gold Mountain is a heartbreaking and universal story about the exiled and displaced, about those who encounter discrimination yet yearn for acceptance.
“These pieces are not so much essays as prose poems, lyrical hymns to beauty and aesthetics.” —Publishers Weekly 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 from a recipient of numerous awards for both prose and poetry. “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
Readers familiar with Lia Purpura’s highly praised essay collections—Becoming, 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.
The first study devoted to a single sculptor in ancient America, as understood through four unprovenanced masterworks traced to a small sector of Guatemala. In 1950, Dana Lamb, an explorer of some notoriety, stumbled on a Maya ruin in the tropical forests of northern Guatemala. Lamb failed to record the location of the site he called Laxtunich, turning his find into the mystery at the center of this book. The lintels he discovered there, long since looted, are probably of a set with two others that are among the masterworks of Maya sculpture from the Classic period. Using fieldwork, physical evidence, and Lamb’s expedition notes, the authors identify a small area with archaeological sites where the carvings were likely produced. Remarkably, the vividly colored lintels, replete with dynastic and cosmic information, can be assigned to a carver, Mayuy, who sculpted his name on two of them. To an extent nearly unique in ancient America, Mayuy can be studied over time as his style developed and his artistic ambition grew. An in-depth analysis of Laxtunich Lintel 1 examines how Mayuy grafted celestial, seasonal, and divine identities onto a local magnate and his overlord from the kingdom of Yaxchilan, Mexico. This volume contextualizes the lintels and points the way to their reprovenancing and, as an ultimate aim, repatriation to Guatemala.
'This is a book about the stories we tell ourselves and one woman's determination to make hers true' Spectator 'A fresh . . . heartfelt book that . . . makes you want to throw away your mobile, run for the hills and learn a traditional craft' The Lady 'A spirited defence of manual labour' TLS At the age of twenty-six, Whitney Brown met a dry-stone waller. Within weeks she was out on the hill with him in Wales, learning the language of dry-stone walling. Far away from the pressures of her old life, she found deep satisfaction in working with her hands, in the age and heft of the stones, and the ring of the hammer. Out under the open sky, Whitney relished every sore muscle and smashed finger, opportunity to stand atop a wall she'd just built and feel like the strongest woman alive. Between Stone and Sky is a celebration of the raw and rugged splendour of the Welsh countryside and the enduring beauty and relevance of traditional craftsmanship. It is an unflinchingly honest account of the emotional struggle to become and belong. Most of all, it is an empowering story of female friendship, accepting uncertainty and risk, and crossing oceans in pursuit of dreams.
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.
Twenty years ago, in England, author Richard Leviton "discovered the planet." Following quite specific guidance, he began a long process that amounted to an apprenticeship. "My mentors dispatched me to various specific locations in the Somerset landscape, and at all hours of the night and day. I sat on hills and valleys and rocks under sunlight, moonlight, rain, snow, and fog, and had visions. I started to see another landscape behind the apparent landscape. It was an apparitional landscape with stars, planets, galaxies, angels, spirits of Nature, mythic deities, divinity." As time went on, he found himself talking with angels, visiting celestial cities, and following gnomes. He came to understand that at one level we are the planet, and that both we and it have an intimate relationship with our galaxy. "I found myself living inside the myths of the world as if they were expert scripts for real-life inner adventures. I never once thought I was crazy. Why should I? Quite the opposite. I believed I was finally getting grounded in something real. But it would take me twenty years to make sense of it. That sense is embodied in The Emerald Modem." The Emerald Modem includes: direct correspondences between human chakras and the Earth's energy features--and the galactic originalstables listing locations of sacred sites around the planet where you may experience this relationshipexplanations of world myths, which provide clues to this unsuspected visionary world around us This is the first book to synthesize all the fragments of geomantic perception (sacred sites, energy points, vertexes, etc.) into a global interactive model that ties human consciousness directly to it. Leviton describes 85 subtle features in the planetary landscape, places you can go for mystical experiences. They are features of the Earth's energy body, almost all invisible to conventional sight. But psychic cognition can be trained, and you can usefully interact with any of these types of sites today without seeing what you're doing. Your intent to interact for the benefit of yourself and the planet is all that's required. Just as modems dial us into the Internet, so the features of the Earth's energy body described in The Emerald Modem help us get online with the galaxy. You can learn to visit Grail Castles, experience a Mount Olympus, or walk through the stars in a landscape zodiac--and you can learn enough to become confident that you're not traveling alone.
“All about looking: at a landscape, at language, at a sign . . . Purpura goes beneath the surface, writing not just about what she sees but what it means.” —Los Angeles Times 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. “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
What Persists contains eighteen of the nearly fifty essays on poetry that Judith Kitchen published in The Georgia Review over a twenty-five-year span. Coming at the genre from every possible angle, this celebrated critic discusses work by older and younger poets, most American but some foreign, and many of whom were not yet part of the contemporary canon. Her essays reveal a cultural history from the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, through 9/11 and the Iraq War, and move into today's political climate. They chronicle personal interests while they also make note of what was happening in contemporary poetry by revealing overall changes of taste, both in content and in the use of craft. Over time, they fashion a comprehensive overview of the contemporary literary scene. At its best, What Persists shows what a wide range of poetry is being written--by women, men, poets who celebrate their ethnicity, poets who show a fierce individualism, poets whose careers have soared, promising poets whose work has all but disappeared.