Approximate Darling

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.