Lia Purpura

All the Fierce Tethers is a breathtaking collection of personal essays by Lia Purpura. There are twenty essays that illustrate how someone capable of extraordinary insight can travel the galaxy while walking the dog.

The title essay “All the Fierce Tethers” in a few short pages takes us from the particular to the universal in magical ways. She starts by recalling how insignificant we all are in the grand scheme of things, how we live lives that are looping over and over in humdrum repetition like the lives of so many other people. He perspective changes to see how that sameness is a kind of greatness, how the humdrum anchors us to memory, history, and each other. Then she amplifies that idea to consideration of ants, hares, and the vastness of the ecosystems we are heedlessly degrading. “To understand ruin, know first what it is that’s being ruined,” she writes and asks for our investment–using the etymology of that word to ask us “to encounter the holy.”

The first essay “Never Minding” considers how often we turn away from things that make us feel bad and decide not to mind. She writes of how the ubiquity of Munch’s “The Scream” has deracinated it, sucking the life and meaning from it. When despair is a design on a mousepad or coffee mug, commodified and never-minded.

I loved All the Fierce Tethers. Lia Purpura is one of those authors enamored of words. She is one of those people who is struck by words. Take this example, “Come to be held. Hear that? Beheld?—the intensified form, the stand-back-so-as-to-see-the-light version, or angle that promises by holding a thing, I’ll be held by it, that attention swings both ways at once. And what to do with that thought?” She explores words and plays with them, she delights in metaphor but also suggests we can never see an eagle so long as we want it to mean something. We will see its meaning, not its essence.

William Blake wrote about seeing the “world in a grain of sand.” Lia Purpura does that and then she shares it with us shimmering, lambent prose. This is a book to linger over and I did. It is a book you can read aloud just to hear the music in the words. Do not rush through All the Fierce Tethers because there is magic there not to be missed.

All the Fierce Tethers at Sarabande Books
Lia Purpura author site

★★★★★
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