"'The story of your creation starts/with a force that wanted something, ' Lia Purpura writes, 'and worked to see if you were it.' A myth of motherhood, a parable of artistic creation, a suite of hymns to an ambiguous emblem, this compelling, Orphic sequence pushes deeply into its chosen vehicle, seeking the diff erence between song and hunger."-Mark Doty"King Baby" is a cycle of lyric poems both inspired by and addressed to a found object made animate-then made into a confessor-by the poet's fascination, and by a love that alternates between the familial, obsessive, and devotional."Untitled""Your form is always with me as I walk, empty and pierced. Today I stopped to see, and touched by seeing, sparrows in the bittersweet, deep in a copse of thorns, their bodies soft among the sharpness, indigo in that light.Not mottled-slate. Not bluish-grey.How good to find distractionin precision."Lia Purpura is the author of two collections of essays, "On Looking" (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and "Increase"; two previous collections of poems, "Stone Sky Lifting" and "The Brighter the Veil"; and a collection of translations. She has received NEA and Fulbright fellowships, as well as an Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Ohio State University Press Award, and the Towson University Prize in Literature. She is Writerin-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland.