The Upstate

"Set in a landscape of red sunsets and wildfire smoke, roadside goldenrod and toxic chemicals in the watershed, The Upstate is a collection of poems about southern Appalachia in its contemporary moment of change. Layering a personal lyric voice with an awareness of social, political, and ecological crises, Lindsay Turner redefines regional poetics as necessarily, inextricably attuned to global structures. These poems both observe and emote, mourning acts of devastation while also raging in their own quiet way against the continuation of such devastation. Arising from moments of darkness and desperation, the poems in The Upstate nevertheless affirm poetry's role under the conditions they describe. Turner's words weave spells around beloved places and people, yearning to shield such treasures from the forces that amass against them. An elegy for pastoralism in a time of disaster, The Upstate is buoyed by a restless sense of discovery and the call to chronicle a world that has all but given itself over to instability and flux"-