Full Description
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.
Contents
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
