Poetry Reading: Lia Purpura
It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful
Location
Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn : Gallery
Date & Time
March 1, 2016, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Description
Poetry Reading: It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful
Lia Purpura, Writer-in-Residence, English, UMBC
It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautifulharkens back to an early
affinity for proverbs and riddles and the proto-poetry found in those forms.
Taking on epic subjects—time and memory, metamorphosis and indeterminacy, the
complicated nature of beauty, wordless states of being—each poem explores a
bright, crisp, singular moment of awareness or shock or revelation. Purpura
poignantly reminds us that short poems, never merely brief nor fragmentary, can
transcend their size. Her poetic language is an instrument of a unique thinking
that seeks to explain that nothing is just what it says—morning is a “blade
stripping away,” uncertainty is a “big project for the future,” the occasion
for a prayer could be a “spot of sun, / bar sign, label / on jeans, / …or a
name the length of a subway car / that makes sense / when you say it aloud / in
your head / as it passes.”
Bio: Lia Purpura is the author of three collections of poems, The Brighter the Veil, Stone Sky Lifting, and King Baby, and three
collections of essays, Increase, Rough Likeness, and On Looking, which was a
finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of
Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Fulbright Fellowships as well
as three Pushcart prizes, among other honors. Her work appears frequently in The
New Yorker, as well as in The
Paris Review, Orion, Agni, Best American Essays and other publications. She is writer
in residence in the English Department at UMBC.
Sponsored by
the Dresher Center for the Humanities and the English Department.
