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 7 collections of essays, poems, and translations.  Her awards include a  Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, and three Pushcart prizes. On Looking (essays) was finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Herpoems and essays appear in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, Field and elsewhere. In 2015, her collection of poems It Shouldn’t Have been Beautiful, will be published by Viking/Penguin. She lives in Baltimore, MD and is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County.