Lia Purpura’s new collection of essays is All the Fierce Tethers (Sarabande Books). Her most recent collection of poems is It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Viking/Penguin.) She is the author of three previous collections of poems (King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, The Brighter the Veil); three previous collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, Increase), and one collection of translations (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch & Taste of Ash).From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How was the book's title (also the title of one of the essays) chosen, and what does it signify for you?Writers Read: Lia Purpura (April 2010).
A: In this moment, to recognize the ways we’re all tethered to each other and to others, the land, the elements that sustain us all and are in themselves alive and sentient is, to my mind, the most urgent project we’re engaged in.
If we are to live together with some sense of equity and justice, if we are to sustain varied communities (and not monocultures of any kind) and see those variations as necessary, then the tethers between us must be recognized not as gossamer and fragile but...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue