Lia Purpura is the author of three collections of poems (King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, and The Brighter the Veil), three collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, Increase), and one collection of translations, (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash). In addition to a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, Lia Purpura has also been awarded an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship (Translation, Warsaw, Poland), three Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, and multiple residencies and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony. Purpura’s poems and essays appear in: Agni Magazine, Ecotone, Field, The Georgia Review,Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and many other magazines and anthologies. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her husband, conductor Jed Gaylin, and their son.
Lia Purpura
Feature
There Are Things Awry Here
I FOUND A PERIMETER, THANK GOD, and I’m walking. I’m making an hour of it, finding a way to get my breathing going hard. These four big lots with big-box stores Continue reading
audio
Orion Authors Aloud: Lia Purpura reads “On Coming Back as a Buzzard”
Audio of the author reading her essay from the September/October 2009 issue of Orion, about the beautiful necessity of an appetite for all things.
Poetry
Design
Here is the day, sun, gulls backlit and cresting, a jackhammer going on, suggesting I’m here but not really in it, I’m more representative of a person in early ambient fall, Continue reading
Poetry
Parking Lot In Snow
Sitting, deepened by this ticking sound which is itself a kind of breath joining my breath slowing impatience measuring nerves so that these too might blow and scatter and land. Then Continue reading