All the Fierce Tethers
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Readers familiar with Lia Purpura’s highly praised essay collections—Becoming, On Looking, and Rough Likeness—will know she’s a master of observation, a writer obsessed with the interplay between humans and the things they see. The subject matter of All the Fierce Tethers is wonderfully varied, both low (muskrats, slugs, a stained quilt in a motel room) and lofty (shadows, prayer, the idea of beauty). In “Treatise Against Irony,” she counters this all-too modern affliction with ferocious optimism and intelligence: “The opposite of irony is nakedness.” In “My Eagles,” our nation’s symbol is viewed from all angles—nesting, flying, politicized, preserved. The essay in itself could be a small anthology. And, in a fresh move, Purpura turns to her own, racially divided Baltimore neighborhood, where a blood stain appears on a street separating East (with its Value Village) and West (with its community garden). Finalist for the National Book Critics Award, winner of the Pushcart Prize, Lia Purpura returns with a collection both sustaining and challenging.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and essayist Purpura (On Looking) evinces great skill as a prose writer in this volume of meditations on nature and society. Her focus is wide-ranging but continually returns to the touchstones of environmental damage, violence in her local Baltimore community, and language's role in forming consciousness. Her environmentalism encompasses climate change issues and observations of incremental but damaging assaults on plant and animal life. She has an eye for strong images, as when she skewers an artist who "casts ant colony sculptures by pouring molten aluminum into their nests." Other strong essays include "Brief Treatise Against Irony"; "My Eagles," which includes a comic quote from Ben Franklin on how the bald eagle "is a Bird of bad moral Character" since "he does not get his Living honestly"; and the brief but keenly observant "On Shadows: Some Investigations," which describes how "shadows begin by leaning into the west, cinch up at noon, and by dusk reconstitute." Purpura's tone can vary, from Annie Dillard like in "Study with Crape Myrtle," or moralizing in "Metaphors Studies," to bitter in "Scream." The selections are linked, however, by a desire that humankind attain more humility, so as to save the planet and itself. Amid the numerous essay collections driven by concern over climate change, Purpura's stands out for its passionate intensity.
