<DIV>Lia Purpura's essays are full of joy in the act of intense observation; they're also deliciously subversive and alert to the ways language gets locked and loaded by culture. These elegant, conversational excursions refuse to let a reader slide over anything, from the tiniest shards of beach glass to barren big-box wastelands. They detonate distractedness, superficiality, artificiality. In the process, Purpura inhabits many stances: metaphysician and biologist, sensualist and witness?all in service of illuminating that which Virginia Woolf called ?moments of being”?previously unworded but palpably felt states of existence and knowing. <I>Rough Likeness</I> finds worlds in the minute, and crafts monuments to beauty and strangeness.<BR><BR></DIV>