All the Fierce Tethers

All the Fierce Tethers

Readers familiar with Lia Purpura's highly praised essay collections―Increase, 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 a Guggenheim, NEA and four Pushcart Prizes, Lia Purpura returns with a collection both sustaining and challenging. 2019 Nautilus Gold Winner in "Lyric Prose" 2020 Independent Publishers Book Awards Gold in Essay Foreword INDIES 2019 Finalist for Essay Big Other Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction "[Lia Purpura] evinces great skill as a prose writer in this volume of meditations on nature and society. . . . Amid the numerous essay collections driven by concern over climate change, Purpura’s stands out for its passionate intensity." ― Publishers Weekly "'Metaphors get compromised. Get eroded and need updating. Rerouting. Reconstituting,' writes Lia Purpura. This is just one of the luminous themes mined in her glittering new essay collection All the Fierce Tethers . In prose that is inventive, with ideas that contract and dilate with fluidity, Purpura considers the mundane and crafts powerful essays that traverse the landscapes that surround us." ― Foreword Reviews , starred review "[Purpura's] understanding and use of language is impeccable." ―"Lia Purpura reads selections from her new book of essays" by Cole Douglass, The Johns Hopkins News-letter "In one of the 20 essays found in this collection, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Purpura. . . quotes her grandmother who advised her to 'steal with your eyes.' This advice may have resulted in the keen power of observation found in Purpura’s writing, but here the author uses her eyes to create rather than steal, as demonstrated by her rich descriptions of items such as a three-legged branch, detritus on a city street, freshly picked cotton, a moose in a meadow, and a flowering tree stump. . . . Highly recommended for readers interested in the essay genre and for English or creative writing students." ― Library Journal , starred review "Witty, friendly, and provocative, Purpura fosters a belief in the authenticity of interaction." ― World Literature Review , print "To see as Purpura sees is to parse experience closer to its raw, vital core. . . .In this time of ecological crisis, no other way of seeing and being in the world bears greater urgency or promise of revitalization." ―Marlie McGovern, Rain Taxi , print "[Purpura's] essays read like prose poems, and her love of language is palpable. Best to read this book when you’re in a quiet, contemplative head space. And read slowly to enjoy every nuance, every breath, every word." ―"Book Reviews: April 2019" by Lauren LaRocca, Baltimore "These essays are the kind of encounters I’d drive in bad weather for. Some are a lot like the heat of another warm body in a small space, some like skidding through snow-covered mud at seventy miles an hour. . . . What Purpura’s book offers to a reader are thingly confrontations, rendered with more sincerity than irony, with more self-awareness than self-consciousness, and that’s all I want from any writer." ―David Grandouiller, Cleaver "Few writers work as hard as Lia Purpura to interrogate the language of our world, to try to shift our perceptions away from the metaphors we habitually apply to what we see. This act is almost a kind of denial of writing ― metaphor, simile, and even cliche are the tools we habitually use to make our observations comprehensible. But Purpura distrusts such simplification, such habits. 'A word is a way to speak about something that really, in truth, no word can touch,' she wrote in her 2011 essay collection, Rough Likeness. Her essays live in the frisson created between the something and the word we’ve resignedly decided accurately represents it." ―Mark Athitakis, On the Seawall " All the Fierce Tethers is both a marvel of language and a treatise on our taking the time to stop, look around, and pay attention to our surroundings and, concurrently, to acknowledge the interconnectedness of life and its objects. Written in vibrant, luxurious prose, Purpura leaves her readers looking at the world in a distinct and more vibrant way."