Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition, Boredom, Purity & Secrecy
"Lee Upton has written a refreshingly honest, compact, ambitious, nuanced, anecdotal, and capacious book about writing. It will make you flinch with recognition. It may also steel your resolve and steady your hand. I find it exhilarating and even wise." --Edward Hirsch"Books on writing are seldom as entertaining as the one that Lee Upton has put together for us. Watching her muse about each of her chosen topics -- ambition, boredom, purity, and secrecy -- alerts us to the pleasures and mysteries of writing and reading. She's sly, eclectic, and never at a loss for bulls-eye examples. Our memories and moods are roused and revisited. We're reminded of writings we've enjoyed and alerted to ones we may not have encountered yet. There's not a shred of pomposity or self-importance in this wonderful rumination on a writer's life, world, and surprised delight." --David Young"Lee Upton announces at the beginning of her marvelous new book, 'This is a book about ambition.' This is true, and it's also an ambitious book, but an ambitious book that wears its ambitions, and brilliance, lightly, endearingly. I can't think of another book like it--at turns erudite, conversational, anecdotal, self-deprecating, commanding, personal and polemical. This is a book about why literature matters, but more than that it's example of why literature matters. The best, most remarkable book from one of our best, most remarkable writers."  --Brock Clarke"Lee Upton advocates 'writing across genres.' Why shouldn't the poet write novels or stories or history or essays? As if to prove the point, here comesSwallowing the Sea, this talented poet's take on ambition, boredom, failure, and secrecy, the four points on any writer's compass. Full of insight, a virtual chrestomathy of apt quotations, this book sails across a Sargasso Sea of modern culture, docking at this port and that, pausing to comment on such landmarks as The Wizard of Oz, the poetry of Dickinson and Plath, the novels of Alberto Moravia and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and the sight of Elizabeth Taylor emerging from her bathtub. It's a grand voyage." --David Lehman--Advance Praise