On Looking
A poet treats looking as a moral discipline, turning it on a dead deer, a body on a slab, a heap of coal. Unsettling in the best way.
Essays on attention, turned on a dead deer, a body on a slab, a heap of coal and the light in a room, by a poet who treats looking as a moral discipline. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and unsettling in the best way, because she refuses to look away at the point most writers would.
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Maria Popova
The second best is poet Lia Purpura’s magnificent essay collection On Looking (public library) — an invitation to see the world whole by apprehending its details and the dialogue between them: church spires and glaciers and seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, the wings of the house fly “gently veined like a fine pen drawing of tributaries,” the late-afternoon light silvering the sardines in the open can.
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