Lia Purpura

Bad Line in a Bad Paragraph
September 5, 2012 Purpura Lia

Bad Line in a Bad Paragraph

 

Where “grab a bite”
means:
something
fast,
and: let’s get on to
elsewhere, quick,
(lest we be
moved to think
anything more
herein
should be accounted for,
practiced harder,
daylight
made better,
called, maybe,
crowshine,
and given a job:
how about
illuminate
this new
country-
in-the-ceiling’s
waterstain.)

Lia Purpura is the author of ten collections, including essays, poems, translations and artists’ books. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Looking (essays), her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as five Pushcart Prizes, the AWP Award and others.  Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, Emergence, and elsewhere. Purpura has served as Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Loyola University; other teaching venues include the Rainier Writing Workshop, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction MFA program, as well as workshops at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility, and the Glenwood Life Recovery Center. Her newest collections are It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (poems) and All the Fierce Tethers (essays).