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Lia Purpura

Lia Purpura’s recent books include the essay collection On Looking (Sarabande, 2006), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and the poetry collection King Baby (Alice James, 2008), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. Recent work appears in the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Paris Review, Orion, and the Georgia Review. Writer in Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, she also teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program.

Nonfiction  – 
Ammonite2 © James St. John via Flickr Creative Commons. CCBY2.0

Entry Cove

On the shores of a suburban lake, a poet and essayist walks the line between decaying industry and remnant wildness, trying to transform the language she has for these landscapes.

Nonfiction  – 

Of Prayer

It was a quilt such as the kind I know to be in most American hotel rooms—synthetic and scratchy on the underside where little pills gather from rubbing, and snags from rings (diamond, engagement, upright in that very impractical setting)…
Nonfiction  – 

•On Tools

That wood won’t work. It was chainsawed roughly by someone who had no eye for logs and now it can’t be split. It’s piled by the side of the road in squat disks like kinged checkers, game over. I myself…
Essay  – 

The Space Between

Where is the fear this afternoon? Where did it go and why can’t I locate it now? A goldfinch flies up while other leaves, gold and russety, sift and fall. A flight up, a flight down, the very air marked,