'September' Response

Lia Purpura’s September is a piece about the bones of a small cat—weird huh? Personally, I am fascinated how Purpura writes about death and decomposition so nonchalantly to the extent she sounds like a scientist.

However, Purpura’s use of literary style and technique creates an interesting narrative about the matter--as if it was an archeological fossil.

The line that I particularly enjoy in this piece was:

The shape the body made was placid-seeming, unlike the animals of prehistory, who, trapped in the posture of shock, in half-light on a cave wall, are forever outrunning fire, weather, attack. (81)

This sentence gives readers a sense of what the author is thinking. What’s interesting is the absence of conjunctions, which makes the sentence sound choppy; however, it also mimics the way how people think thoughts and see things—one thing at a time. This also sets an analytic tone to the narrative. 

Aside from that, the author also plants a lot of abstract/ vague sentences such as: simple bodies are sketched in ochre flight, red oxide smudge on a flank. These sorts of imagery are difficult to picture without having to dissect the sentences—word for word. And I think the author has written the narrative in a way that puts readers in the same shoes as how she analyzes the cat’s bones.