"Increase" is Lia Purpura's chronicle of her pregnancy, the birth of her son, Joseph, and the first year of his life. She recounts her journey with the heightened awareness of a mother-to-be and through the eyes of a poet, from the moment she confirms her pregnancy as "A blue X slowly crosses itself, first one arm, then the other in the small white window of the test," through "the X of his crossed feet in sleep" as her child's world begins. Purpura's sensibility transcends the facts of personal experience to enfold the dramatically changing shape of a larger, complex world.These closely knit...

A powerful new collection from poet, essayist, and frequent New Yorker contributor Lia Purpura
Lia Purpura has won national acclaim as both a poet and an essayist. The exquisitely rendered poems in this, her fourth collection, reach back to an early affinity for proverbs and riddles and the proto-poetry found in those forms. Taking on epic subjects--time and memory, metamorphosis and indeterminacy, the complicated nature of beauty, wordless states of being--each poem explores a bright, crisp, singular moment of awareness or shock or revelation. Purpura reminds us that short...