Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles

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