Middle Slope: Poems - Paperback

by Lindsay Turner (Author)

A collection of plainspoken contemporary nature poems teeming with pastoral paranoia and quiet beauty from a powerful emerging poetic voice.

It's nice that the mountains kind of hold you in place.
I live neither in a valley nor on a peak but on the middle slope,
a place from which I want and want.
If I cry out, the sound might rise or it might fall.
It is the best place to be for storms, for it is not where lightning
strikes
nor where the rain collects and washes out the land.

Set primarily in the suburban West, below the peaks of the Rocky Mountains--land of cold snaps and blinding sun, dusty urban sprawl and wayward wildlife--Middle Slope is about mountain ecologies, the changing climate, infertility, and uncertainty.

Between the extremes of peaks and valleys, the poet finds herself on the "middle slope," in a stilled, failed, and frozen time. Lindsay Turner's third collection is carnal, intimate, chthonic, and animal. These are nature lyrics, but with a view of nature that is distinctly contemporary, a vision of the natural world that is by us endangered and from which we are alienated. Through repetition, striking imagery, and simple expressive language gone awry, these poems capture a deep, slow thawing, things beginning to ease up and open. Contrasting the cyclical nature of seasonal change with the ruptures and comings-together of the romantic dyad, Turner captures a transformation that is both everyday and sublime.

Author Biography

Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections The Upstate and Songs & Ballads. Her translations from the French include books by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Stéphane Bouquet, and others. Her translation of Bouquet's The Next Loves was long-listed for the ALTA National Translation Award, short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award, and named a New York Times notable poetry collection of 2019. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Case Western Reserve University.