Lia Purpura

Purpura's beautifully wrought second collection of lyric essays, addressing the ethics and aesthetics of seeing.

Essays

On Looking

Simon Elliott Stegall

Couldn't finish this one. I have nothing against the lyric essay in particular, but Purpura's style is so overly lyrical it verges on incoherence. She uses images and splintered concepts to evoke a poetic aesthetic, but there is little control or content underneath the flowery language. If these essays were poems I think I would have been more inclined to like them, but as essays I thought they were corny and boring.

Purpura's main conceit is suggested by the title: On Looking. The notion of seeing quotidian things in a new way is an old essayistic trope; but Purpura does more "looking" than seeing. After reading a few of her essays, I wasn't convinced that she saw things in a new way. She slaps misty and saccharine poeticisms onto things and labels it "lyric" and "looking" but it's just bad poetry.

I want to qualify this by saying that I love obscure and splintered poetry- Eliot and Auden are classic examples of seemingly incoherent poets that are actually well worth laboring over. I also love lyrical essayists like Dillard and Soyinka. But Purpura's book, in my opinion, is not a good specimen of this genre.

On Looking Essays

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