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.

Lee Upton's poetry has appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Southern Review, and three editions of Best American Poetry. She is a fiction writer and literary critic as well as a poet. She has written six other collections of poetry, including Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania. www.leeupton.com