Books in Review In “Dead Sea”—a poem that manages to hold within it everything the surrounding poems aim to reach in their orbit—it is just such magic that offers to save the speaker from her own cynicism, a spring that “had secrets and knew where jewels were, / in a house nobody lived in, and only children / would ever find the key.” Fearless in the face of unrelenting power, the poems are at once tactile and enraged, refusing to acknowledge anyone’s ability to constrain language. In “38 Billion,” the speaker harnesses the simplicity of a list to highlight what US dollars could buy instead of weapons. Reading each benign item— “Eggs . . . Ribbons . . . Really Soft Pillows. . .” —we are reminded of the absolute brutality of the alternative. With very few exceptions, the poems in the book are deeply powerful both on their own and in their connections to one another. In “Losing as Its Own Flower,” the natural imagery assigned to hope as well as that assigned to suffering reminds us of the steadfastness of both: “Truth unfolds in the gardens, / massive cabbages, succulent tomatoes, / orange petals billowing, / even when the drought is long. . . . / In a way, we did lose. Where is everybody? / Scattered around the world like pollen.” This book has been for me a difficult and necessary starting point; a chance to repopulate the Palestine that I have been continually fed with living, breathing, and profoundly hopeful human beings. No matter what your beliefs, no matter where you stand on this conflict, no one can argue that that is a bad thing. Bailey Hoffner University of Oklahoma Lia Purpura All the Fierce Tethers Louisville, Kentucky. Sarabande Books. 2019. 116 pages. An eclectic and diverse collection of twenty essays, Lia Purpura’s All the Fierce Tethers excels in the interplay of its tripartite emphases: language, nature, and prose. Purpura plays with linguistics and conception . Through speculative word creation, she combines Greek and Latin roots to form new words for lengthy, thoughtful phrases, such as “aesthesioplegia” from aesthesio (sensation) and plegia (paralysis) for “the loss of relationship to singular objects due to an overabundance of them.” Dissecting metaphor and refuting irony, she examines how we verbalize and visualize thoughts. Concurrently, she draws the reader into the breathtakingly complex world of fire ants, eagles, moose, and opossums, personifying them and simplifying us. All the while, her writing shines through, from sweeping backdrop descriptions to precise depictions of specific details to judicious use of sparsity for emphasis. Although these three elements pervade the collection, the essays cover a variety of topics in various writing styles. Not every essay will equally satisfy every reader, and one or two will likely come across as too abstract or too literal, depending on the reader’s taste, but there is just as certainly at least one essay each reader will love. “My Eagles” struck a deep chord of emotional resonance and intellectual stimulation, and the joy of such a collection comes in allowing all who open its pages to find a piece that speaks clearly to them. Purpura often focuses on the existential, but she occasionally grounds the reader firmly in the everyday of contemporary America. This action seems reassuring at first, but she uses it to foreground violence and struggle, particularly that of her own Baltimore community, although it speaks to a much greater reality. She never suffocates the reader with screams of warning, however, but delivers a subtextual appeal to humanity to simply do better, whether in neighborhoods, the environment, or perception and appreciation. Witty, friendly, and provocative, Purpura fosters a belief in the authenticity of interaction. In writing about her own engagement with the world, she interacts with her readers as well, encouraging them to do the same. All the Fierce Tethers succeeds in providing a defamiliarized lens for looking both outward and inward. James Farner University of Oklahoma Nuruddin Farah North of Dawn New York. Riverhead Books. 2018. 373 pages. NuruddinFarah’slatestnovel,NorthofDawn, is a book that epitomizes the existential crisis 82 WLT SPRING 2019 ...