Lia Purpura – It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful

Lia Purpura has won acclaim as both a poet and an essayist; her poems are now regularly published in The New Yorker, and her 2006 collection of essays, On Looking, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this, her fourth work of poetry, Purpura breaks personal new ground with a delightful collection of short poems, arranged by the four seasons, many of them with an allegorical or maxim or riddle-like feel, that deal with themes of time and memory, metamorphosis and indeterminacy, as reflected in both the natural and the human worlds. Each poem explores a bright, crisp, singular moment of awareness or shock or emotion  the mysteries and enormousness of these moments  fully writing into the density of them.