The Upstate

"Turner’s sense of our precarious, increasingly degraded existence informs and animates The Upstate, alongside her preoccupation with the failure and responsibilities of language in relation to such an existence. This is a poetics of crisis—ecological and existential—of what it means to live, and to write, in close proximity to the violence of environmental crisis and to the jagged, resilient beauty of what remains of the natural world. . . . Like Bishop and Ishiguro, Turner is interested in what happens when our environments, and the tools we use to read them, stop making sense, and in how, as we seek out other ways of knowing, we pilot our way through them. . . . Language in The Upstate is as present an entity as the trees and highways, an object, albeit mercurial, with which Turner’s speakers grapple." * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"Turner is one of those poets who appears capable of turning just about any observation or experience into a successful poem." * California Review of Books, on "31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2023" *
Named one of the Best Southern Books of October 2023 * Southern Review of Books *
"In a time of environmental and civic toxicity, Turner attends to our flailing integrity in her second collection, The Upstate, which opens with a screencast image of contemporary Eden and closes in contemplation of human need. Between, Turner introduces the effects of industrial pollution, seeks to weave protective spells in her community, and ultimately tackles a capitalism that takes from others, through its cycle of production and accumulation, more than it gives. Turner is interested in what roles we play as accomplices to our destruction and challenges us to contend with these intractable problems." * Colorado Review *
"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." * On the Seawall *
"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. . . . 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." * rob mclennan's blog *
"As it progresses, The Upstate becomes a guide, a handbook on squinting—a way to relate to so many American landscapes without reproducing the geographies of capital that dismissed them as backwaters." * Chicago Review *
"To resist calling The Upstate a volume of regional poems, set in southern Appalachia, is to honor the stylistic impulse that surpasses one moment in time; just as important, to call The Upstate a volume of regional poems is to acknowledge its attention to these proximities." * Cleveland Review of Books *
“Turner has been a poet to watch since before her first book; she has also become a poet to marvel over, a poet carrying poetry into the next decades. But The Upstate is more than just an affirmation of what Turner’s readers already knew—it is a catalog of the impossibilities of living in the present cultural moment, and yet it resolves itself in hope, in a vision of the possibility of ‘money without death,’ and so a vision of a world better than any world before it. Turner sees a future world that is better than it could be, and in The Upstate she takes her poetry there. This is a salvific book.” -- Shane McCrae, author of "Cain Named the Animal"
“These words will always stay with me: ‘The question is who does your money come from / The question is whose loss.’ With lyric force, Turner expresses the magnitude of toxic wreckage in the landscapes of southern Appalachia, as well as the scales of sorrow for a country and world that pretend wealth comes at no cost. Her exquisite poems grieve precisely for people, water, trash, animals, air, flowering trees. I feel lucky to have The Upstate in my hands and its cadences in my body, reminding me. ‘Who can’t live the thing she wants which is good and reasonable / Because of your money.’” -- Joanna Klink, author of "The Nightfields"
“The Upstate packs teeming lack. Turner has worked a poetry of muscular disgust for plutocracy. Track how the poet tends to glare then look askance, but in a way that damns, not frets. Who ends a poem with ‘credible, credible’? The same poet who, when near-subsumed in impressionistic flood, brickwalls the lines into remarkable crush: ‘Burning transparent all the way up to the top where the workers / Rise into a general collective of all they wouldn’t offer.’ Turner, that’s who. The Upstate is an uppercut as statement. That’s what.” -- Douglas Kearney, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "Sho"
“This memorable, original book begins with an American place—upstate South Carolina—as Turner’s guide. For her, this centering of poetry in place means dislocation, not orientation. Through this collection, Turner makes a unique contribution to contemporary American poetry, mixing a faith in poetic form’s sonic insistences with a lack of faith in social consensus, turning individual poems into energetic hubs of discord.” -- Katie Peterson, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "Life in a Field"
"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." -- Rob McLennan