Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles

Lee Upton is the author of The Tao of Humiliation: Stories, the essay collection Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy; the novella The Guide to the Flying Island; and a fifth collection of poetry, Undid in the Land of Undone. She is a professor of English and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College. 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\u27s title. Anyone who has spent dreary hours in time-consuming meetings will enjoy Upton\u27s transmutation of the experience in \u27The Committee.\u27 A meditation on \u27The Defeatists\u27—people whose reflexive mantra is \u27we\u27re not out of the woods yet\u27—includes the paradox that even their search for disappointment is bound to result in failure. In \u27Modesty,\u27 Scheherazade, the \u27patron saint of suspense,\u27 beguiles her tyrant with her tales, though \u27At some level // she could do nothing for him.\u27 This thought is capped off with the stunning couplet that ends the poem: \u27Neither could have / Chekhov.\u27 These are poems to read, reread, and ponder. The rich heritage of English poetry—Herrick, Keats, Poe, Dickinson, Wallace Stevens—hovers over Upton\u27s labors and adds an extra layer of wit for the discerning reader. —David Lehman These poems have tensile strength and pleasurable intelligence. They\u27re muscular and ironic. Some are tough minded and thistle-prickly (as Flannery O\u27Connor was tough and prickly, also with a dash of Plath). The swallowed violence in fairy tales and \u27the romantic\u27 is reimagined here. Female archetypes are one of Upton\u27s touchstones: Pandora, Salome, mermaids, Lady Macbeth, Persephone. The poems interrogate ways we used to live versus what we\u27re 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 More Information: Lafayette College Poetry Society of America The Adirondack Review The New Yorkerhttps://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clpc_bks/1160/thumbnail.jp