On Looking: Essays Book

My formal review, which was published back in 2008, is lost somewhere in cyberspace (and yes, I've tried the "Wayback Machine") or is stuck on an inaccessible hard drive. In any case, I did find a bit of it: "I think of On Looking, Lia Purpura's collection of essays about perception, being, self-apprehension, object recognition, and words, words, words, as a whirling dynamo of currents and pulses. Its startling lyricism, its dripping lushness, its frothing sensuousness, and its fascination with minutiae'with the universes contained within a speck, a thing, a breath, a jot, an interval, a space, a vacuum..." In other words, this is an astonishing collection of essays, and after a second reading, it still surprises, language- and form-wise; and it stands'and I say this unabashedly and without exaggeration'as one of the greatest essay collections ever written.