It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful (Penguin Poets)

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful (Penguin Poets)

<b>A powerful new collection from poet, essayist, and frequent <i>New Yorker</i> contributor Lia Purpura</b><br>  <br> 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.