Fall Colloquium Series: Lia Purpura

In both poetry and prose, Lia Purpura is interested in looking hard at that which is passed over, off limits, degraded, or even ruined. While her essays range in their stances (from biological to metaphysical to sensual investigations), her poems have taken on shorter, tighter, more rhetorical constructions. In some ways, the essays behave more like poems and the poems like essays. In her talk, she will read new work and discuss some recent incarnations of this practice of close looking. She will also address some of the challenges of integrating a lyric sensibility (which prefers mystery and the sidelong) with overt concerns about our increasingly complex relationship to the environment. Please join us for the second talk of our Fall Colloquium Series with Lia Purpura, entitled, "It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful."