A poet, Purpura argues in these brief, charged essays that it matters what we call things—ants are “whom—not which, not things,” and as such shouldn’t be treated like things. But many things also deserve better: Purpura, a connoisseur of the singular, resists the single-use consumer culture that discards so much that’s still useful. We’re able to waste so much because we’re taught to “not mind”—we don’t see what we’re missing, and often can’t name it, either. Showing us the ants’ complex cities, the eagle that turns a symbol back into a bird, the timing that makes snowshoe rabbits white, the human-like eyelashes of cow #419, Purpura takes us to the “spots no words touched, where language unhinged.” Prose in appearance only, her accounts of intimating, then seeing, a moose; following the decomposition of a bird into a “house framed out, barrel staves, then…the keel of a skiff”; and of being overwhelmed by a crepe myrtle in full, stunning bloom, not only “make something of the moment,” as she continually urges, but make “each moment of seeing be again its own shining grunt of creation,” in which we are “found and rearranged.” These essays will do that to you.
