It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

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.