The Brighter the Veil

1996

“Lia Purpura is a master of the particular. She observes a neighbor ‘walking back from the bus/with a bag of groceries,’ so she knows it must be ‘four-thirty, five.’ She sees walls, buttons, hat brims, as if from the inside. She is a realist and one step beyond. She is a recorder of the soul as it rests comfortably or uncomfortably inside us and our things. She is honest and true. And moving.”                     — Gerald Stern