The thing about it is that it is hard to read, or much harder, much less accessible, in it's short paragraphs. The paragraphs and sentences are like little gems, wonderfully selected descriptions that are sort of at once lavish and very simple and believable . . . unique and fresh ways of describing something that immediately paint a vision in your mind. It is very much like poetry. and yet you struggle as a reader to connect these paragraphs, to see what she is getting at overall, and to hold all the images in your mind long enough to see how they belong together. I like it because even if I can't quite pin my finger on just what it is that emerges from these small treasures of writing, I do feel that something more significant is being said. And that makes me want my artwork to follow that model -- that a collection of gemlike pieces might somehow begin to generate, together, and hum and make a nicer thing that is more complex and more elusive than the parts alone. There is sort of an undercurrent of sadness or ominous warning or seriousness, by the mention of death so often in the pieces . . . like when she interjects a paragraph stating that all this was going on while her friend was dying. It lends a gravity and narrative to otherwise object-focused descriptions of things. She uses very small, very discrete narratives to make her point, but the whole of the essays begins to reveal something about her, about her life, about her family and friends, that makes it compelling, and she seems very present. I think this is important because the descriptions, were it not for her being so present, might be just lonely objects without this person to connect them and give them significance. Some of it was boring to read and it took longer and was significantly slower to finish, this book, than the other book I was reading simultaneously (a shamelessly dramatic novel with sex and suicide and mystery that i could barely put down), but this reminds me that the push to make art more "difficult" is actually not just an asshole move, but really does make some difference. I mean to say that there is something perceptibly better about her writing, so that even though it is more demanding of me as a reader, I feel more energized or alive by engaging with it, in a way that the novel cannot do. Anyway, it helps that I like HER, or the person she reveals as an author, and am continually amazed and surprised and pleased by her choices of words.
Said better than I, here are the publisher comments about her book
"Publisher Comments:
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."
And an example of that writing:
"Purpura describes single objects beautifully: Chinese lanterns are 'those orange, papery pods gone lacy in fall, with a dim, silver berry burning inside.'"
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