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 "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.