The Upstate, Lindsay Turner’s second poetry collection, includes four poems entitled “The Upstate,” the first of which begins:
It always was a little like an outpost here
The sun is big behind the smog
You fill out forms and then you die
That open-ended “here” refers to Turner’s particular Upstate, the northwestern corner of South Carolina — but this Upstate is also a figure for much of the United States, with its enormous distances between exurbs. It’s also an existential terrain, a kind of objective correlative for alienation, disgust, and anger. The Upstate faces a situation of nearing the “Midway or the midpoint of my life,” in what increasingly feels like a world crueler than it has to be, where injustice and disaster flicker both down the street and beyond the horizon.
Although a literal place is central to The Upstate, the locale itself is only minimally sketched. This might be because it is now overlaid with “strip malls, parking lots of trailers selling pills and armchairs” and “a wealth of places of supplies for everything mechanical or animal.” But more broadly, Turner refrains from the linguistic and aesthetic reliefs of description. An apt example of this refraining from particularity comes near the end of the book, where a line that seems to promise a catalog of flowers fizzles out: “Jasmine the white roses some purple things I don’t know how to name.” The multipart poem called “Wasted Empty Space” (not just wasted space, not just empty space) does include an inset poem entitled “List of Flowering Trees,” but it consists simply of that list: six species of flowering trees, each given their own line and initial capitals, flatly and comically — as if acknowledging that the lavish specificity of plant names may often animate poetry, but not here. Although Turner occasionally refers to dogwood or mountain ash, she does so without elaboration: these plants are part of one’s surroundings but not observed closely and lovingly. One revealing exception is in “New City,” where delicate vegetation appears just at the start of a time-lapse of a building going up: “silver grass, maiden grass, red ground beneath / pretty blond planks then some days for the walls.”
Instead, the world of the literal and figurative Upstate generates a sense of depletion. It also comes across as casually and glancingly violent (roadkill and dogfights), generic (strip malls and parking lots), and contaminated (haze and smog). Adjectives are frequently suggest lack: “the depopulated suburbs,” “the decimated lawn,” the “less than stubble in the field” (followed by the even more subtractive “when the leaves blew away it was mostly mud / there was a yard but there was less than grass in it”). As such quotations suggest, there are many definite articles — the dog, the cows, the road, the highway, the paper mill, the air, the lake, the clay, the sign that “said ‘window tinting’ or ‘sunless tanning’” — as if there’s one kind of everything, as Elizabeth Bishop’s Crusoe had on his island, and a lot of those kinds are depressingly similar. The world is bleaker, more constrained than it was, even as its wrongs seem more overwhelming.
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The third line of the initial “The Upstate” — “You fill out forms and then you die” — resonates with those who spend an increasing part of their days dealing with waivers, applications, registrations. But to “fill out forms” has another set of resonances: the poetic sense, of committing to a shape and pattern, crucial to Turner, whose first book was entitled Songs & Ballads (2018). The Upstate calls up relics of many fixed forms: it includes unrhymed tercets and quatrains, stanzas that look like irregular pantoums, repetition-dense “spells & charms,” and audible strings of anapests. Turner is intensely alert to the sounds poems can make, and her poems are musical in the most interesting sense of that word.
Form is under strain in The Upstate, often poignantly, as heard in the tiny poem “Superstition”:
red sky whenever
whatever the weather
red sky at all times
will all the rhymes fail
The original proverb may have been dependable for mariners. But such rhymes might be useless in this new world, whose skies are colored by vehicular aerosols and wildfires. In “Superstition,” apprehensiveness glints even in the narrow confines of dimeter; three quarters of this four-line poem dwell on the relentlessness of a flat, artificially red sky — an immediately audible example of the power of Turner’s distressed forms: even in their absence, the older rhythms act as a foil to the new ones, as the predictable cadences of red sky at night become red sky at all tímes. It’s a metrical substitution that happens chronologically as well as on the page.
Another example of poetry’s charged, tense response to environmental devastation appears in the first two stanzas of “Forms of Displeasure,” which points to how corporate (and human) priorities wreak havoc on the rest of the world:
the hawks are a-nesting
storms in the evenings
no the hawks are re-nesting
the forest is gone
they clearcut the forest
the smell of black plastic
the forms of displeasure
are circling the lot
The first two lines suggest a phrase-based stanza, one anchored in the kinds of comfortingly repetitive images accumulated in a folk song or lullaby. But the third line — “no the hawks are re-nesting” — amends it. The hawks aren’t “a-nesting,” with that faintly old-fashioned, rural prefix for an ongoing action, but “re-nesting,” at best: where can they nest, if every tree has been cut down? Ecological grief spreads amid the clusters of sound, the subdued correspondences of nesting and evenings, storms and forest, the sudden intense assonance of black plastic, the more distant half-rhyme of gone and lot. And it forces changes to meter: “no the hawks are re-nesting” disturbs the familiar metrical patterns just established.
This world of pollution, of “phthalates and parabens / circling like drones,” also ends up being a world of verbal pollution, of phrases like “what you need to understand is / it’s big things not people,” where a vaguely ominous and condescending voice touches on the looming structures that destroy ecosystems. Such landscapes — their high temperatures, red skies, every other way we have affected the rest of the nonhuman world — are increasingly a part of one’s anxiety, as in the second quatrain of “Premonition”:
hot light in the hot sky
haze and the light waits
to come down / particulate
the hot sky waits to get at us
It’s not fate or God that waits to “get at” us, just the unescapable sky and heat themselves. Elsewhere in The Upstate, encounters with pollution grow almost claustrophobic: “the water’s not clear so there’s red in it too,” the “too” making a link between dirty sky and dirty water. And there’s a desperate wish to avoid the worst: “promise it will not be in our lifetimes that it turns to fire” is a hope to get out before the all-encompassing “it” gets really bad. Even innocuous phrases sometimes initiate dread, as when “the medium-big green leaves become a darkish tunnel.”
I’ve noted above that The Upstate largely avoids language that would make the actual Appalachian upstate a visually appealing place. That avoidance helps Turner document a cerebral landscape, as established in nearly everything I’ve quoted. Turner expresses the exhaustion of not being able to sleep at night (“I couldn’t imagine any other way to sleep I hadn’t tried”) and the melancholy and estrangement of falling asleep during the day:
The trees glowed but it felt like the end of air
I cleaned so hard we could see the outlines
Then I fell asleep and woke up on the porch
While it’s possible to read that third line with parallelism and ellipsis (so that both verb phrases take “on the porch”), in effect the syntax enacts the surprise of a nap that leaves one disoriented, of abruptly finding oneself on the porch. (Note also the “glow[ing] trees,” something probably beautiful here registering as apocalyptic; the general disjointedness of the one-sentence lines; and the indistinct, undirected “I cleaned so hard we could see the outlines”: this place seems to leave one isolated and on edge, cleaning and napping.)
These poems — and nearly every poem in The Upstate — convey a mind trying to keep going amid both its own and the world’s crises. The fourth poem entitled “The Upstate” begins with what sounds like personal disaster: cryptic references to “toxins” and to “the bloodstream,” to how “before we knew I felt the silence fall,” and to a subliminally eerie metaphor of“infusing everywhere like spring into the trees.” But the poem moves to large-scale human disaster, to images of people desperate to get out of dangerous places:
the changes gather in the bloodstream and move out from there
the people gather shouting at the airports or are stuck there
the people gather somewhere or die trying
this is neither metaphorical or new
This scope, from the biochemical to the global, becomes most apparent in the book’s final two poems, long ones in jagged free verse. They concentrate on the effects of what is simply referred to as “money” — the effects of money that people with money prefer not to think about. Here scathing lines turn on both the economic systems we live in (“I can confirm / Your money is a thing and thriving”) and the habits of language and thought that help such systems continue (“The question is what do they do to merit living / I mean afford”). Turner conveys how comfortable one’s entanglements with capitalism can be, and how comfortably isolated one can be from its damage: “Turn your other cheek on your clean stripey pillowcase it smells / Like detergent like your door closed to the outside of the capital city.”
One other thread in The Upstate — a quieter one — is care. Care in multiple senses: care as in worry, care as in duty, care as in tenderness amid near hopelessness; care as in caring very much about what is happening in and to the world, and to particular people. It can be heard in the troubled, wry, haunting “Charm for J,” which admits that charms don’t protect and that rhymes fail, and which ends with the kind of repetition that now functions as rhyme:
humid summer will be past
say the heavy days are jewels
wear them like they’re really jewels
[Published by the University of Chicago Press on October 6, 2023, 66 pages, $18.00 US paperback]