Approximate Darling: Poems

by Lee Upton

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.

104 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1996

About the author

Lee Upton writes books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and literary criticism. Her comic novel, Tabitha, Get Up, will be released in May 2024 from Sagging Meniscus Press. A literary mystery is forthcoming in 2025. She is also the author of The Day Every Day Is, winner of the Saturnalia Books Prize, and two collections of short stories, The Tao of Humiliation, and Visitations, which were both awarded the Kirkus Star. The Tao of Humiliation received the BOA Short Fiction Prize. Her novella, The Guide to the Flying Island, was awarded the Miami University Novella Prize. Her collection of essays, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy, received ForeWord Review's Book of the Year Award in the category of books about writing. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Poetry, Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, and in three editions of Best American Poetry.

Reviews

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lee Upton is a special poet, quirky, often surrealistic, meaty. The long poem here, "Portraits of Nudes," is a tour-de-force.