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.
- ISBN13 9781936747030
- Publish Date 5 January 2012 (first published 1 January 2011)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Sarabande Books, Incorporated
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 224
- Language English