Lindsay Turner, The Upstate

 

what would it be like to stay here forever

we went up a mountain and went up a fire tower

the seasons themselves felt annulled like a marriage

it doesn’t matter if it was never gone through with (“Tennessee Quatrains”)

The follow up to her full-length debut, Songs & Ballads (Brooklyn NY: The Prelude Press LLC, 2018)) [see my review of such here], is Cleveland, Ohio-based poet and translator Lindsay Turner’s collection The Upstate (Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2023). 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. “Why doesn’t anyone here speak for their own life,” she writes, to close the opening poem, “Planning,” “Once in South Carolina there was a flood behind the storage units / Once it was believed relief from was a thing in store / In my life the major errors accumulate behind me as I go / Soon you will be able to read them like a poem [.]” 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. “I was in another state when it happened,” she writes, to open the poem “Song of Accumulation,” “long since left out under the sky / I felt the glass grow lighter in my hand / I thought, I should pay more attention to what’s strange [.]” Or, as the poem “Vacation Song” opens:

Sorry to interrupt your peace. No it’s my job just to sit around soaking up beauty like a sponge. The tall weeds blew in circles, a big gull flew by. Black shards from a campfire. Everybody’s thinking there might not be much else left soon. Burnt shards. No everybody’s thinking that.

Get it tattooed on your calf or your forearm. The only being on the rocky outcrop, some things present in their outlines while the others sink into the sea. The other things dissolve in toxic fog. The other things are sold in pieces so small you couldn’t recognize. Everybody’s thinking it. speculated on all you ever loved. Told to be itself properly or it couldn’t exist. We all did it.

The days fell out light and hardwood. We almost didn’t recognize it.