“Poignant, exquisite, and endlessly witty” ― Kirkus Review (Starred Review)
“People―the species defies logic!” reflects the protagonist of one of the dazzling, intricate stories in Visitations. In this latest collection from Lee Upton, characters navigate often bewildering situations, from the homeschooled girl trying to communicate telepathically with an injured man she finds on the beach to the experimental theater troupe (called the Community Playas) composed primarily of actors the story’s narrator has wronged or been wronged by.
Upton’s stories frequently draw inspiration from books―books as art objects or lost objects, as inspiration or points of contention. “Night Walkers” tells the story of the world’s laziest book club, while “A Story’s End” follows a woman’s search for the last book read by her mother before her sudden death. Elsewhere, the ghosts of literature and writers past haunt the characters’ present: “The Tell-All Heart” sees a woman falling in love with Edgar Allan Poe’s discarded suit, and an unruly, unpredictable shadow creeps in a child’s window to demand that he cut off the other hand of Captain Hook in “A Shadow.”
In the surreal yet playful tradition of Karen Russell and George Saunders, Visitations brings together seventeen incandescent short stories from a writer at the height of her powers.

Visitations: Stories (Yellow Shoe Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Upton, Lee

Short Stories & Anthologies

LSU Press

In her most ambitious collection of poems to date, Lee Upton extends and deepens her experiments with perception and language.
Drawn into the orbit of her poems are multiple figurations--a Dante-inspired guide and a Leonardo da Vinci cartoon, Hamlet's Gertrude, and Lewis Carroll's Alice--and Emily Dickinson, Beatrix Potter, Louise Bogan, and Sylvia Plath.
While investigating elements of women's biological, emotional, and spiritual experiences that prove particularly recalcitrant to language, she draws her attention to the "relentless experiment" of pregnancy and childbirth.
Upton examines fleeting moments when objects are seen at the periphery of vision and draws upon the language we use in contemplating the psychic aftereffects of contemporary violence, dispossession, and exclusion.

Approximate Darling: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry)

Poetry

University of Georgia Press

This study of Garrigue reappraises the career of this distinguished poet by focusing on her central motifs.

Jean Garrigue: A Poetics of Plenitude

Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Pr

"This study argues for a new reading of Bogan, whose complex position in regard to gender makes her one of the most provocative of the major modernists. Lee Upton analyzes the ways in which Bogan's poetry reflects unconscious processes marked by women's experiences, and she also explores both the implicit and the explicit violence that the poems embody in their opposition to psychological and social constraints. Rather than a repressed poet as she is figured in much contemporary criticism, Bogan is seen as self-consciously studying repression in poems of extreme confrontation, reflecting an aesthetic of difference, and intimating the workings of the unconscious. Upton argues that Bogan based her authority on her allegiance to the subversive unconscious rather than on cultural law." "Upton investigates Bogan's themes of obsession and release, among the primary psychic activities that her poetry charts. Obsession is portrayed as excessive preoccupation with betrayal in love and psychological engulfment, particularly as it is embodied in an unnamed force and culturally positioned to deny the female poet's "breath," and thus her art. In Bogan's allegiance to the lyric, the impassioned "cry," she expressed her desire to understand obsession. Increasingly beset by her own imaginative silences after the publication of her third book, Bogan sought to dramatize the process of release from obsessive fears of betrayal and entrapment."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of Louise Bogan

History & Criticism

UNKNO

The Muse of Abandonment examines personal and cultural forms of abandonment in the poetry of Charles Wright, Russell Edson, Jean Valentine, James Tate, and Louise Gluck. The first book to consider these poets as members of a generation, this work explores the five poets' reflections on coercion of thought and behavior and an atmosphere in contemporary culture that would trivialize private sensibility. The poets' recasting of confessional and surrealist legacies is also analyzed.

The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets

Much of our strongest poetry that learned its lessons from early modernism lives by its defensive measures, that is, by means of reversing, inverting, and challenging in covert ways a dominant perceptual mode. Defensive Measures explores strategies by which poets claim their distinctiveness, and argues that poetry is the one literary form that most insistently demands a defense. It demands a defense, it would seem, because it is perpetually in crisis - not only in regard to its utility and its aesthetic appeal (or the vigor of its renunciation of such an appeal), but in regard to its generic existence. Upton defines a generative conception of defense and examines in a new light the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Gluck, and Anne Carson. In writing about Bishop. Upton puts this well-regarded poet in a new framework, aligning her work with that of three poets whose aesthetics might be viewed as antithetical to her own ...

Defensive Measures: The Poetry Of Niedecker, Bishop, Gluck, And Carson

Poems examine the connections between memory and facts, the passage of time, the pressures of love, and the alienation of daily life

No Mercy (National Poetry Series Books (Paperback))

Atlantic Monthly Press

Poems examine the connections between memory and facts, the passage of time, the pressures of love, and the alienation of daily life

No Mercy: Poems (National Poetry Series)

Atlantic Monthly Pr

Poetry. "'What if I won't find what I expect when I open this?' is one of the first lines in Lee Upton's excellent new book, BOTTLE THE BOTTLES THE BOTTLES THE BOTTLES. It's the perfect salutation for a book that deals out genuine surprise—in thought, image, and feeling —with the formal dexterity of a Vegas pit boss. This is without a doubt my new favorite book. Upton has long been a well-respected poet, prose writer, and literary critic, but she deserves much more popular attention, including yours."— Erin Belieu "Lee Upton is a poet of rare intelligence and craft. She has a cold eye and a warm heart, and her poems are well-made, moving, intellectually stimulating. Among my favorites in BOTTLE THE BOTTLES THE BOTTLES THE BOTTLES, her admirable new collection, are poems that resemble an unconventional verse essay on a subject disclosed in the poem's title. Anyone who has spent dreary hours in time-consuming meetings will enjoy Upton's transmutation of the experience in 'The Committee.' A meditation on 'The Defeatists'—people whose reflexive mantra is 'we're not out of the woods yet'—includes the paradox that even their search for disappointment is bound to result in failure. In 'Modesty,' Scheherazade, the 'patron saint of suspense,' beguiles her tyrant with her tales, though 'At some level // she could do nothing for him.' This thought is capped off with the stunning couplet that ends the poem: 'Neither could have / Chekhov.' These are poems to read, reread, and ponder. The rich heritage of English poetry—Herrick, Keats, Poe, Dickinson, Wallace Stevens—hovers over Upton's labors and adds an extra layer of wit for the discerning reader."—David Lehman "These poems have tensile strength and pleasurable intelligence. They're muscular and ironic. Some are tough minded and thistle-prickly (as Flannery O'Connor was tough and prickly, also with a dash of Plath). The swallowed violence in fairy tales and 'the romantic' is reimagined here. Female archetypes are one of Upton's touchstones: Pandora, Salome, mermaids, Lady Macbeth, Persephone. The poems interrogate ways we used to live versus what we're in the grip of now. And they question what beauty is, in a voice both droll and fierce. They give off a dark gleam."— Amy Gerstler

Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles (New Poetry)

Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Fiction. Off the coast of the small town of Truror is an island steeped in local legend, a place once home to mysterious religious orders and apocryphal lost settlements ... a place that seems, in the right fog, to lift right out of the water and fly. This peculiar past has made the island, in the present, a minor tourist attraction, drawing sightseers and the devout alike. On an otherwise routine tour, Jake Isinglass, a native son of Truror and guide to the island, witnesses something he can't explain: a young woman falls from an island cliff to her death ... or jumps to her death ... or vanishes into thin air. What follows in Jake's investigation finds him uncovering not just the island's difficult history but his own. Written in evocative, atmospheric prose, THE GUIDE TO THE FLYING ISLAND is at once a ghost story, a mystery, and a meditation on the ways our lives remain haunted by the secrets of our pasts.

The Guide To The Flying Island

Literary

Miami University Press

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