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The Upstate

The Upstate

$18.00

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$18.00

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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.
  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. Planning
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
 

“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.”
“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.’”
“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.”
“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.”

Additional information

Dimensions 1 × 7 × 10 in