King Baby

by Lia Purpura

“Purpura’s charming [third collection]…captures both the fierce love and the flighty weirdness of life with a baby, opting always for the symbolic and the surprising over the literal record…” — Publishers Weekly “This book-length sequence is reminiscent of poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, with its hypnotic voice and its otherworldly reach.” — Library Journal “In King Baby … Purpura uses the physical as a conduit to the metaphysical; and circles this found fetish in ever-more-incisive gyres, to probe the never-satisfied nature of human yearning…She is particularly effective at distilling those elusive slithers of creative clarity we sometimes experience in our daily lives…Purpura is a wordsmith of the highest order…” —Susan McCallum-Smith, WYPR Radio