Rough Likeness: Essays

by Lia Purpura

Lia Purpura’s essays are full of joy in the act of intense observation; they’re also deliciously subversive and alert to the ways language gets locked and loaded by culture. These elegant, conversational excursions refuse to let a reader slide over anything, from the tiniest shards of beach glass to barren big-box wastelands. They detonate distractedness, superficiality, artificiality. In the process, Purpura inhabits many stances: metaphysician and biologist, sensualist and witness—all in service of illuminating that which Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”—previously unworded but palpably felt states of existence and knowing. Rough Likeness finds worlds in the minute, and crafts monuments to beauty and strangeness.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 23, 2011

About the author

Lia Purpura (born February 22, 1964, Mineola, New York) is an American poet, writer and educator.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm looking for a muse for my Creative Nonfiction class and my professor pointed me to Purpura, to Leach, and back to Dillard.

Something funny happens to me when I read Purpura. She demands all my attention. It actually drives me crazy but then I want to know how she does it, why I have to give so much more of myself to understand her than to practically anything else I read.

My professor is trying to get me to read more of the non-fiction writers who either are poets or write more poetically, so I can stretch myself. It's hard to know where to start with Purpura but for now I'll just remark on the parts I like best.

"On Coming Back as a Buzzard" went places I didn't expect, and how could I not like that?

"The Lustres" is like a memoir of words learned but saying it that way doesn't even start to do it justice.

"Being of Two Minds" showed a completely different way to write about literature, and I think if I could copy anything it would be something about this piece.

Purpura seems dense and complicated until you start reading it out loud and then it all makes perfect sense. Such a bizarre experience.

[Natalie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to read this for a class, otherwise, I never would have gotten past the first essay. My professor mentioned earlier in class that Purpura was a sexy, new essayist. If that is true, then she is just not my type. I found her essays to be self-indulgent and largely pompous. I also simply couldn’t follow them. For example, in her “Try Our Delicious Pizza,” she flits from a postcard her husband received, to sadness, trees, airports, more sadness, and apples (of course--apples!)among other things and after all of the jumping around, I asked myself at the end, “Wait, what happened to the pizza?”

I had just struggled through the “Gunmetal” essay, thinking there was no possible way she could continue to prattle on about that particular color of the sky until a few chapters later when she presented us with “Gray” and I had to run away from my book screaming. And I don’t even know where to start about the lyric essay on poop.

I don’t mean to be sarcastic, well, maybe I do, but I just wasn’t feeling Purpura. I realize that she writes lyric essays and maybe they just aren’t my thing. I haven’t read other lyric essays so I don’t know if Purpura is typical of lyric essayists, but I found the meandering to be difficult. I had to re-read so many parts because I just started to drift. But in situations where I really made myself focus, I found that I had no idea what the hell she was talking about anyway. She made me feel stupid and I hate feeling stupid.

Now, before you think that I hate beautiful language, I will admit that Purpura does write some pretty sentences. I’m just not sure what they mean. I understood every single, individual word and had no idea what it meant when she put all of those words together to make a sentence. I realize that she is poetic, but she just tries too hard. One particular favorite (and by "favorite" I mean, thing that made me want to slam my head against a wall with maximum force), was in “Against ‘Gunmetal’” in which she described ponchos as “calm and isoscelate, then blown scalene in wind.” I got the imagery, even though I hated geometry in high school, but it just seemed overdone. And, no, I don’t hate poetry. Poetry is wonderful, but I think the thing that makes poetry so wonderful is its brevity; the ability to use words economically to paint beautiful and vivid pictures. Purpura isn’t economical in her language. She’s running on a huge word budget deficit, spending her words as carelessly as a Chicago politician with taxpayer money, completely disregarding what it is doing to the rest of us.
Instead of finding any of her musings interesting, by the end of an essay (if I could manage to stay with her), I found myself asking, “okay, what was the point of that?” Then I found myself asking, "Why me?"

[Melissa Matthewson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is how Lia Purpura builds an essay: observation of the small dailiness of life, for example, a postcard arrival beckons a mediation on sadness, or she wanders a box store parking lot and goes into reflection of life before the pavement, or the house she remembers, or doesn't. Such beautiful writing with elegant sentences that use unusual construction and verbs to communicate meaning, insight. This book takes time. You can't rush through these essays, but must cherish them. Each one.

[Andi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Quiet. Tiny. This books makes me want to absorb the tiny way that the stain on my desk looks like sunburn or maybe leopard skin up close. It makes me want to pay attention and then lay my words against that intention with great care.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

[Reading Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's marketed wrongly as essays, when what the book really contains are prose poems, many of them wandering and shapeless. I get the conceit--she's going to map the way the mind jumps around, the free association, that shakes free memory and language, the constant hunt and settling for words, but it doesn't really sustain itself well. Maybe because Solnit's Faraway Nearby does it so much better in comparison?

I think she's good, but not great. She does--sometimes--some breathtaking things with and to language, but sometimes she just goes beyond into incomprehensibility.

And despite her protests, the 'Shit's Beautiful' piece is at once tryhard edginess and a squeamish failure. The first piece is the most successful, I think, the most coherent and even then it just Beats the Point Into Your Head. Maybe I like a little nuance?

I'm glad I read it, and I do love how she stretches language, but I'm not rushing out to buy her other works.

[Rich · Rating 1 out of 5]

Again, i chose to blaze ahead. Some of the descriptions in the book seem forced to the point that i thought “is language really like a thin paper that flutters under a table chair, just out of reach and clinging to the hardwoods?”

I decided it wasn’t and moved on.

[McKenna Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The amazing thing about this book is what she does with language. It's not a page turner, but it's delightful.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lia Purpura writes poignantly in long and short form. I am learning so much from her. I have to read her slowly, because I have to think about the different levels each word is hitting in the context of the essay.

I so loved the ocean as a child that I had to be dragged out when it was time to go home. If you’ve grown up with waves, you come to learn that they don’t knock you down as much as allow you various decisions about staying upright, show you’ve chosen to stay in their path, try your luck, pit your strength. And though we say “a wave knocked me down,” it’s not that waves care. They’re as rote as heartbeats. (26)

[Sarah Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such limpid, lucid, and intensely poetic writing. This is the kind of book that allows me to see nonfiction anew: to see so much more as "deserving" of held, rapt attention.

Confession: It took me some time to settle in, to "accept" the kind of work Lia's doing, not out of envy necessarily, but out of a nagging, judgemental feeling that the work was too "internal" and maybe even pompous. No. This isn't that. This is a stellar reckoning with certain intimacies known to us all and hardly expressed.

Favorites: "Remembering," "Shit's Beautiful," "Tools," and "Two Experiments."

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essays! Essays! Essays! So much to like in this collection. In "Memo Re: Beach Glass" there's that enlightening line, "The browns are attributable to brewery trash—Buds, Miller Lights, and the common, local, sometimes historically significant varietals (National Bohemian in Baltimore)." In "On Tools," Purpura can't think of a mnemonic for the wood that "contains the most BTUs per cord." Simply a wonderful read.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Purpura's essays are intensely lyric (as problematic as that term's turning out to be) while still remaining firmly rooted in the real--things like big box stores and splitting wood and the excretory process all come under the microscope. There are interesting forms--"Advice," especially--but very often, these are straightforward essays that twist and turn all over the place. Lovely.

[Efad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Purpura's images are microscopic. "On Coming Back as a Buzzard" and "Shit's Beautiful" are must-reads. Google them if you can't get hold of this book.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reviewing this for The Hollins Critic. Interesting group of essays!

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of powerful essays. "Shit's Beautiful" was my favorite. Made for intriguing, thought-provoking summertime reading. Is also a good example/intro to the mystifying 'lyric essay.'

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[AJ Nolan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense book of lyrical essays. Don't read these if you are in a rush - it is a book best savored, essay by essay, like a hard candy dissolving on the tongue. The last essay was my favorite.