Kirjahaku

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.

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.

In Civilian Histories, her fourth book of poetry, Lee Upton portrays contemporary culture as the many-eyed, monstrous argus, and explores the common gestures between people and among cultures that constitute “foreign relations.” Formally ambitious, ranging from short, allusive lyrics to long, intricately patterned sequences, Upton’s poems reflect on complicity in and vulnerability to violence. Her poems also explore moments of hard-won triumph for the vivid, provocative people who inhabit them.

This is an inspiring book about writing and—more unusually—a book that honors ambition, that idiosyncratic drive that compels writers and other artists to action despite every kind of obstacle. Upton explores forces that threaten our ability to fulfill the most daring aspirations, and she examines ambition’s adjuncts, including failure, boredom, and purity, offering a provocative antidote:obsession. Ultimately Upton argues for a new perception of literary art as “a good secret” for our time, when our interior lives and our imaginations are under threat.

This is an inspiring book about writing and—more unusually—a book that honors ambition, that idiosyncratic drive that compels writers and other artists to action despite every kind of obstacle. Upton explores forces that threaten our ability to fulfill the most daring aspirations, and she examines ambition’s adjuncts, including failure, boredom, and purity, offering a provocative antidote:obsession. Ultimately Upton argues for a new perception of literary art as “a good secret” for our time, when our interior lives and our imaginations are under threat.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2014 Best New Fiction of May 2014, Typographical Era Alternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these 17 stories introduce us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a student who contends with her predatory professor; and the startling scenario of the last satyr meeting his last woman. Writer-in-residence and a professor of English at Lafayette College, Lee Upton is author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Whether crisp and understated or capacious and kinetic, the poems in Lee Upton's seventh collection are lyrically dexterous and reverberant. Shrewd, formally ambitious, excavating cultural myths and contradictions, these poems allow the ordinary and the supernatural to inhabit one another. The poems are often attentive to suffering: torture as it persists through centuries, the extinction of species, and the agonies of illness, grief, and the blasting of innocence are meditated upon. At the same time, in this book of mysteries, the cultivation of the redemptive energy of wit, in favor of the sensual and tender, performs as a means to resist violence.

Tabitha is a lonely fifty-year-old biographer who, in order to restore her self-respect and pay her rent, attempts to write two biographies simultaneously: one about an actor so famous his face is on the side of buses, and the other about a popular writer of children's books recently outed as an author of erotic fiction. Is Tabitha ready to deal with interviewing an actor so handsome and charismatic she thinks he should be bottled and sprayed on belligerent people as a form of crowd control? Can she form a genuine friendship with a cult novelist who pressures her to compromise her values? While facing these and other challenges, Tabitha is bedeviled by memories of her long-ago divorce and the terrible wedding when, accidently bumped on a balcony, she shot off into the shrubbery. Is it true, she wonders, that there's probably a dead body beneath the floating rot of any marriage? When surrounded by pretentious beautiful people does it help to imagine their intestines are full of worms? Are champagne bubbles the devil's air pockets? Is it ever too late to change your life-from the bottom up?