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On Looking : Essays by Lia Purpura is a work of literary fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is On Looking : Essays about?

“These pieces are not so much essays as prose poems, lyrical hymns to beauty and aesthetics.” —Publishers Weekly Lia Purpura's daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura's hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson's words: “I like the silent church before the sermon begins.” In “Autopsy Report,” Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our bodies after death, examining the “dripping fruits” of organs and the spine in its “wet, red earth.” A similar reverence is held for the alien jellyfish in “On Form,” where she notes that “in order to see their particular beauty... we have to suspend our fear, we have to love contradiction.” Her essays question art and its responses as well as its responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing a

Who reads On Looking : Essays?

Author

Lia Purpura

Publisher

Louisville, Ky.: Sarabande Books

Published

2006

Language

EN

ISBN

9781932511390

Category

work of literary fiction

Subjects

Science, Literary Criticism, Nature

Rating

4.17 / 5 (311 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14