Lee Upton

Lee Upton’s The Day Every Day Is

Lee Upton’s The Day Every Day Is

Superstition Review
The Day Every Day Is, Saturnalia Books, March 2023 | Lee Upton

Congratulations to Lee Upton for her upcoming poetry collection and winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize The Day Every Day Is, published by Saturnalia Books. Described as “attentive to suffering,” Upton’s poems explore torture throughout the ages, grief, illness, and “the blasting of innocence.”

Lee Upton’s language is limpid and shimmering. Her voice is transparent and entirely her own. Her mind is clear and focused and profoundly informed. Her tone is casual, intimate, inviting. And all these elements conspire together in her work to create utterly convincing yet unexpected and unanticipated lyrical presentiments and precisions of awareness and insight. Her poems startle by what they show us of the world, and astonish us by the way they take root and live in our minds.

Vijay Seshadri, author of the Pulitzer prizewinning 3 Sections

Lee Upton is the author of fifteen books, including The Day Every Day Is; two short story collections; an award-winning novella, The Guide to the Flying Island; an essay collection; and six additional books of poetry and four books of literary criticism.  Her first collection of stories, The Tao of Humiliation, received starred reviews from Kirkus and Library Journal as well as strongly positive reviews from The New York Times, PublishersWeekly, and Booklist.  Kirkus selected the collection for their listing of “The Best Books of 2014,” one of eleven collections in the short story category that included titles by international authors, among them Alice Munro and Hilary Mantel. Her second collection of short stories, Visitations, was listed in “Best of the Indies 2017” by Kirkus.

Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and in three editions of The Best American Poetry as well as in The New Yorker, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, and other magazines.  Her awards include the Pushcart Prize; the Open Book Award; the Lyric Poetry Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America; the Miami University Novella Prize; and Book of the Year Award in the category of books on writing from Foreword Review for Swallowing the Sea: On Writing and Ambition, Boredom, Purity and Secrecy.

Pre-order The Day Every Day Is here. Learn more about Lee Upton by visiting her website.

Her short story After the Party appeared in issue 17.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Author Lee Upton

Cass Murphy

Lee UptonToday we’re celebrating the launch of Issue 17 with our first Issue 17 Authors Talk. We’re proud to feature Lee Upton as our twenty-sixth series contributor, discussing her story “After the Party.”

It’s a concise and insight-packed podcast covering the dialogue and “language games” of the characters, the subtext of the story’s dialogue, and the composition and revision of the story itself.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel, #213.

You can read Lee’s story in Superstition Review, Issue 17.

More About the Author:
Lee Upton is the author of books of poetry, fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Her most recent books are Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2015), and The Tao of Humiliation: Stories from BOA Editions (2014).

About the Authors Talk series:

For several years, we have featured audio or video of Superstition Review contributors reading their work. We’ve now established a new series of podcasts called Authors Talk. The podcasts in this series take a broader scope and feature SR contributors discussing their own thoughts on writing, the creative process, and anything else they may want to share with listeners.