Poetry 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.
 

"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"

"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

"Named one of the Best Southern Books of October 2023" - Southern Review of Books

"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

"To resist calling The Upstate a volume of regional poems, set in southern Appalachia, is to honor the stylistic impulse that surpasses one moment in time; just as important, to call The Upstate a volume of regional poems is to acknowledge its attention to these proximities." - Cleveland Review of Books