Upstate

Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collection Songs & Ballads and a translator of contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy. Turner is originally from northeast Tennessee and currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Case Western Reserve University.

"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."

• PlanningThe UpstateThe UpstateOverlookAccompliceForms of DispleasureThe UpstateTennessee QuatrainsNew CitySong of AccumulationSpells & CharmsPremonitionPretty Like ThatThe UpstateCharm for JCharm for WCharm for the NeighborhoodCharm for GIt Imagines the Destruction It WantsVowsSuperstitionThe CompassTender PublicsAccomplice (Isabella from Measure for Measure)Just WorkWasted Empty SpaceIt’s the Stupidest ThingDogwoodA Bad SpringVacation SongPoemSong of Untellable DistancesThe CapitalsAccompliceAcknowledgments