The Upstate

By Alexander Laban Hinton

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.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9780226828657

Alexander Laban Hinton

LINDSAY TURNER is assistant professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She is the author of the poetry collection Songs & Ballads and the poetry chapbook Fortnights. Her translations from the French include books by Amandine André, Stéphane Bouquet, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Frédéric Neyrat, Richard Rechtman, and Ryoko Sekiguchi.

Book preview

Cover Page for The Upstate

The Upstate

Edited by Srikanth Reddy

Rosa Alcalá, Douglas Kearney & Katie Peterson, consulting editors

The Upstate

Lindsay Turner

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2023 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2023

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82864-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82865-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226828657.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Turner, Lindsay, author.

Title: The upstate / Lindsay Turner.

Other titles: Phoenix poets.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Series: Phoenix poets

Identifiers: LCCN 2023000622 | ISBN 9780226828640 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226828657 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3620.U76557 U67 2023 | DDC 811/.6—dc23/eng/20230113

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000622

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for my father

It was not regional it was systemic.

C. D. Wright

Contents

Planning

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The Upstate

The Upstate

Overlook

Accomplice

Forms of Displeasure

The Upstate

Tennessee Quatrains

New City

Song of Accumulation

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Spells & Charms

Premonition

Pretty Like That

The Upstate

Charm for J

Charm for W

Charm for