Stone Sky Lifting

Stone Sky Lifting PDF Author: Lia Purpura
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
Stone Sky Lifting is a study in states of extremity, portraying violence at one end of the spectrum and unbidden solace at the other. Focusing on transforming events, Purpura depicts the spiritual dislocation that can result from abiding scrutiny. With a metaphysical sensibility, Purpura moves between our world's abundance and its mysterious stillness in her subject matter. Over the course of the book, a shaken vision emerges -- one of trespass, both worldly and spiritual, and of repair. The poems in this collection don't seek resolve; rather, they make space for paradox to root. Silences become revelations in Purpura's poems.

Stone Sky Lifting

Stone Sky Lifting PDF Author: Lia Purpura
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 104

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stone Sky Lifting is a study in states of extremity, portraying violence at one end of the spectrum and unbidden solace at the other. Focusing on transforming events, Purpura depicts the spiritual dislocation that can result from abiding scrutiny. With a metaphysical sensibility, Purpura moves between our world's abundance and its mysterious stillness in her subject matter. Over the course of the book, a shaken vision emerges -- one of trespass, both worldly and spiritual, and of repair. The poems in this collection don't seek resolve; rather, they make space for paradox to root. Silences become revelations in Purpura's poems.

Lifting the Sky

Lifting the Sky PDF Author: Mackie d'Arge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1599909898
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
12-year-old Blue's mom has always told her, "just bloom where you're planted." And it's a good motto, considering Mam never stays in one job or one place for very long. Then Mam gets hired as a hand at the 2 Bar Ranch, and for the first time, Blue finds in its rundown buildings and majestic mountain setting a place she longs to call home. There she makes a friend in an enigmatic Indian named Shawn, whose search for an ancient petroglyph intrigues her. And it's there that the faint auras Blue has always noticed around people begin to grow brighter-and become something she learns to control, and to heal with. But Mam begins to show signs of getting restless, and when the father who abandoned Blue suddenly shows up, the family-and the home-she's always wanted are threatened.

Stone Sky Gold Mountain

Stone Sky Gold Mountain PDF Author: Mirandi Riwoe
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
ISBN: 0702263907
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Family circumstances force siblings Ying and Lai Yue to flee their home in China to seek their fortunes in Australia. Life on the gold fields is hard, and they soon abandon the diggings and head to nearby Maytown. Once there, Lai Yue gets a job as a carrier on an overland expedition, while Ying finds work in a local store and strikes up a friendship with Meriem, a young white woman with her own troubled past. When a serious crime is committed, suspicion falls on all those who are considered outsiders. Evoking the rich, unfolding tapestry of Australian life in the late nineteenth century, Stone Sky Gold Mountain is a heartbreaking and universal story about the exiled and displaced, about those who encounter discrimination yet yearn for acceptance.

All the Fierce Tethers

All the Fierce Tethers PDF Author: Lia Purpura
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1946448311
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book 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.

On Looking

On Looking PDF Author: Lia Purpura
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1936747219
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
“These pieces are not so much essays as prose poems, lyrical hymns to beauty and aesthetics.” —Publishers Weekly Lia Purpura’s daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura’s hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson’s words: “I like the silent church before the sermon begins.” In “Autopsy Report,” Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our bodies after death, examining the “dripping fruits” of organs and the spine in its “wet, red earth.” A similar reverence is held for the alien jellyfish in “On Form,” where she notes that “in order to see their particular beauty . . . we have to suspend our fear, we have to love contradiction.” Her essays question art and its responses as well as its responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing and the sensual. Above all, Purpura’s essays are a call to notice. She is writer-as-telescope, kaleidoscope, microscope, and mirror. As she says: “By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare.” This is, indeed, a rare and startling treasure of a book from a recipient of numerous awards for both prose and poetry. “Purpura is the real deal, and so is every successive sentence in this collection. A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult witnessing.” —Albert Goldbarth “Purpura’s prose is a system of delicate shocks—leaps and connections and syncopated revelations, all in the service of the spirit negotiating the truth of its experience.” —Sven Birkerts

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful PDF Author: Lia Purpura
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143126903
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
A powerful new collection from poet, essayist, and frequent New Yorker contributor Lia Purpura Lia Purpura has won national acclaim as both a poet and an essayist. The exquisitely rendered poems in this, her fourth collection, reach 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 reminds us that short poems, never merely brief nor fragmentary, can transcend their size, like small dogs, espresso, a drop of mercury.

Between Stone and Sky

Between Stone and Sky PDF Author: Whitney Brown
Publisher: Constable
ISBN: 9781472127327
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
'This is a book about the stories we tell ourselves and one woman's determination to make hers true' Spectator 'A fresh . . . heartfelt book that . . . makes you want to throw away your mobile, run for the hills and learn a traditional craft' The Lady 'A spirited defence of manual labour' TLS At the age of twenty-six, Whitney Brown met a dry-stone waller. Within weeks she was out on the hill with him in Wales, learning the language of dry-stone walling. Far away from the pressures of her old life, she found deep satisfaction in working with her hands, in the age and heft of the stones, and the ring of the hammer. Out under the open sky, Whitney relished every sore muscle and smashed finger, opportunity to stand atop a wall she'd just built and feel like the strongest woman alive. Between Stone and Sky is a celebration of the raw and rugged splendour of the Welsh countryside and the enduring beauty and relevance of traditional craftsmanship. It is an unflinchingly honest account of the emotional struggle to become and belong. Most of all, it is an empowering story of female friendship, accepting uncertainty and risk, and crossing oceans in pursuit of dreams.

Rough Likeness

Rough Likeness PDF Author: Lia Purpura
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1936747340
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
“All about looking: at a landscape, at language, at a sign . . . Purpura goes beneath the surface, writing not just about what she sees but what it means.” —Los Angeles Times 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. “Lia Purpura is at the forefront of the New Essay, and this latest book (her best) takes us much closer into the rough terrain of her quirky mind than she has ever gone before. The surprises and insights keep coming. Rough Likeness is an astonishment—a book to savor, read slowly, smile at, sigh at, and cherish.” —Phillip Lopate

Finding America

Finding America PDF Author: R.M. Singhose
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1450228348
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
For Jim and Rose Singhose, any day they are riding their Harley Davidson motorcycles is a good day. Since 1998, they have logged more than 100,000 miles riding cross-country on their bikes. In this, her second book, author Rose Singhose narrates the couples journey from their home near Cottage Grove, Oregon, to Tybee Island, Georgia, and back again in the summer of 2002. Follow Rose and Jim as they leave their home the morning of June 29, 2002, destined to attend the kick-off party July 19 in Atlanta, Georgia, for Harley Davidsons 100th birthday. As they travel through the heart of America, they celebrate the Fourth of July in Russell, Kansas; they investigate the happenings in Branson, Missouri; learn more about the Natchez Trace in Mississippi; and walk into the Atlantic Ocean, boots and all. This memoir narrates finding America the Harley Davidson way. With charm, Finding America describes the people, places, and events Rose and Jim encounter as they experience the thrill of the open road. During this trip, taken on the heels of the events of 2001, the Singhoses discover that good is alive and well in the United States.

Letter to a Stranger

Letter to a Stranger PDF Author: Colleen Kinder
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1643752235
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
“Beautiful. The human condition is on full display in these glimpses of our essential connectedness. Perfect for our times.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance Sixty-five extraordinary writers grapple with this mystery: How can an ephemeral encounter with a stranger leave such an eternal mark? When Colleen Kinder put out a call for authors to write a letter to a stranger about an unforgettable encounter, she opened the floodgates. The responses—intimate and addictive, all written in the second person—began pouring in. These short, insightful essays by a remarkable cast of writers, including Elizabeth Kolbert, Pico Iyer, Lauren Groff, Gregory Pardlo, Faith Adiele, Maggie Shipstead, Lia Purpura, Kiki Petrosino, and Jamil Jan Kochai, are organized around such themes as Gratitude, Wonder, and Farewell and guide us both across the globe and through the mysteries of human connection. Addressed to a first responder after a storm, a gambler encountered on jury duty, a waiter in Istanbul, a taxi driver in Paris, a roomful of travelers watching reality TV in La Paz, and dozens of others, the pieces are replete with observations about how to live and what we seek, and how a stranger’s loaded glance, shared smile, or question posed can alter the course of our lives. Moving and unforgettable, Letter to a Stranger is an irresistible read for the literary traveler and the perfect gift for anyone who is haunted by a person they met once and will remember forever.