Description
Book SynopsisPoetry that sings of southern Appalachian beauty and crisis. Set in a landscape of red sunsets and wildfire smoke, Queen Anne's lace on the roadsides, and toxic chemicals in the watershed, Lindsay Turner's The Upstate is a book about southern Appalachia in a contemporary moment of change and development. Layering a personal lyric voice with a broader awareness of labor issues and political and ecological crises, The Upstate redefines a regional poetics as one attuned to national and global systems. These poems observe and emote, mourning acts of devastation and raging in their own quiet way against their continuation. The poems in The Upstate arise from moments of darkness and desperation, mobilizing a critical intelligence against the status quo of place and history, all while fiercely upholding belief in the role of poetry to affect these conditions. Turner's poems weave spells around beloved places and people, yearning to shield them from destruction and to profess faith in the delicate beauties of the world at hand.
Trade Review"Turner’s sense of our precarious, increasingly degraded existence informs and animates
The Upstate, alongside her preoccupation with the failure and responsibilities of language in relation to such an existence. This is a poetics of crisis—ecological and existential—of what it means to live, and to write, in close proximity to the violence of environmental crisis and to the jagged, resilient beauty of what remains of the natural world. . . . Like Bishop and Ishiguro, Turner is interested in what happens when our environments, and the tools we use to read them, stop making sense, and in how, as we seek out other ways of knowing, we pilot our way through them. . . . Language in
The Upstate is as present an entity as the trees and highways, an object, albeit mercurial, with which Turner’s speakers grapple." * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"Turner is one of those poets who appears capable of turning just about any observation or experience into a successful poem." * California Review of Books, on "31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2023" *
Named one of the Best Southern Books of October 2023 * Southern Review of Books *
"Turner is intensely alert to the sounds poems can make, and her poems are musical in the most interesting sense of that word. Form is under strain in
The Upstate, often poignantly." * On the Seawall *
"As it progresses,
The Upstate becomes a guide, a handbook on squinting—a way to relate to so many American landscapes without reproducing the geographies of capital that dismissed them as backwaters." * Chicago Review *
"
The Upstate is a collection of lyrics that seem to be composed from a place of wisdom and experience, albeit one hard-won and hard-earned, offering lines worn and clear and present. . . . The lyrics offer optimism at points but are otherwise pragmatic, offering lines and lyrics of fierce directness and density, moment-think and short, accumulating as narrative-fragments across an ethos of the known, the unknown and any possible future." * rob mclennan's blog *
“Turner has been a poet to watch since before her first book; she has also become a poet to marvel over, a poet carrying poetry into the next decades. But The Upstate is more than just an affirmation of what Turner’s readers already knew—it is a catalog of the impossibilities of living in the present cultural moment, and yet it resolves itself in hope, in a vision of the possibility of ‘money without death,’ and so a vision of a world better than any world before it. Turner sees a future world that is better than it could be, and in The Upstate she takes her poetry there. This is a salvific book.” -- Shane McCrae, author of "Cain Named the Animal"
“These words will always stay with me: ‘The question is who does your money come from / The question is whose loss.’ With lyric force, Turner expresses the magnitude of toxic wreckage in the landscapes of southern Appalachia, as well as the scales of sorrow for a country and world that pretend wealth comes at no cost. Her exquisite poems grieve precisely for people, water, trash, animals, air, flowering trees. I feel lucky to have
The Upstate in my hands and its cadences in my body, reminding me. ‘Who can’t live the thing she wants which is good and reasonable / Because of your money.’” -- Joanna Klink, author of "The Nightfields"
“
The Upstate packs teeming lack. Turner has worked a poetry of muscular disgust for plutocracy. Track how the poet tends to glare then look askance, but in a way that damns, not frets. Who ends a poem with ‘credible, credible’? The same poet who, when near-subsumed in impressionistic flood, brickwalls the lines into remarkable crush: ‘Burning transparent all the way up to the top where the workers / Rise into a general collective of all they wouldn’t offer.’ Turner, that’s who.
The Upstate is an uppercut as statement. That’s what.” -- Douglas Kearney, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "Sho"
“This memorable, original book begins with an American place—upstate South Carolina—as Turner’s guide. For her, this centering of poetry in place means dislocation, not orientation. Through this collection, Turner makes a unique contribution to contemporary American poetry, mixing a faith in poetic form’s sonic insistences with a lack of faith in social consensus, turning individual poems into energetic hubs of discord.” -- Katie Peterson, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "Life in a Field"
"The Upstate is a collection of lyrics that seem to be composed from a place of wisdom and experience, albeit one hard-won and hard-earned, offering lines worn and clear and present." -- Rob McLennan
Table of ContentsPlanning
The Upstate
The Upstate
Overlook
Accomplice
Forms of Displeasure
The Upstate
Tennessee Quatrains
New City
Song of Accumulation
Spells & Charms Premonition
Pretty Like That
The Upstate
Charm for J
Charm for W
Charm for the Neighborhood
Charm for G
It Imagines the Destruction It Wants
Vows
Superstition
The Compass
Tender Publics
Accomplice (Isabella from
Measure for Measure)
Just Work
Wasted Empty Space
It’s the Stupidest Thing
Dogwood
A Bad Spring
Vacation Song
Poem
Song of Untellable Distances
The Capitals
Accomplice
Acknowledgments
