King Baby
* Winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Press
‘The story of your creation starts/with a force that wanted something,’ Lia Purpura writes, ‘and worked to see if you were it.’ A myth of motherhood, a parable of artistic creation, a suite of hymns to an ambiguous emblem, this compelling, Orphic sequence pushes deeply into its chosen vehicle, seeking the difference between song and hunger.” — Mark Doty
“The poems in King Baby are both folk tales and found objects: every line reaches the page like Pushkin’s talking goldfish. A child’s discovery of a hand-carved totem frees Purpura from the daily round of semiotics. Like the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof’s work, every poem in this collection reminds us that we are each still newly placed among the living.” — Stephen Kuusisto