ALL THE FIERCE TETHERS BY LIA PURPURA
Each page of Lia Purpura’s newest essay collection, All the Fierce Tethers, demonstrates what happens when life itself is scrutinized beneath the lens of a proverbial microscope. With the revelatory combination of Purpura’s detail-oriented eye and imagination, she is able to cast a brilliant, transformative light on even the most quotidian aspects: a tin that once held mints “[c]ould be put to good use and serve again, holding buttons, coins, pills;” the dollar bills used at the grocery store can evoke a wonder of their previous purchases, the possible “bribes they sealed, drugs scored;” and when a hawk dives into grass and emerges again with a mouse, she meditates on the blood from the kill. The “sun falls on the spot where I know the blood is. Someone climbing this tree on a bright day in fall wouldn’t notice a thing, the red long gone to shadow or moss.” Purpura examines this predator/prey relationship: “the piercing and tearing was urgent and bloody, and—no proper animal would think to note this—there was no anger, waste, or meanness.” She guides the reader in this illuminative way, covering a vast and eclectic range of subjects, from prayer to irony, beauty, even to the once peaceful, now extinct Dodo.
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.
—Review by Nicholas John-Francis Claro
