A CONVERSATION WITH LINDSAY TURNER
by CORRIE LYNN WHITE
Lindsay Turner’s third poetry collection, Middle Slope, is forthcoming in October 2026 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Atlantic, Lit Hub and more. She is also a French-to-English translator of poetry, philosophy, and children’s books. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with her husband and son and is Associate Professor of English and creative writing at Case Western Reserve University.
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Corrie Lynn White: When I read your work, C.D. Wright came to mind, and the project of broadening the regional perspective. Your previous collection, The Upstate, is rooted in the Appalachian region, while with Middle Slope, we’re traveling west, downslope, and forward in time. In the titular poem, you write: “This is the land of not valley and not peak.” As I was reading, I felt like I was inside an “almost” space, both emotionally and geographically. I would love to hear how you hoped this title would situate the reader.
Lindsay Turner: I’m really glad you brought up C.D. Wright. She has a wonderful line that was actually the epigraph for The Upstate: “It was not regional, it was systemic.” I was thinking in The Upstate about the way the forces that shape Southern Appalachia are both local to the place and also much bigger than the place. When I was writing about the Rocky Mountain West, which is where I moved in 2019 for a job at the University of Denver, I was really trying to figure out what it was like to be a person in a new region. It took me a while to learn how to see things out there. The Rockies are so beautiful and also so different from the Blue Ridge. At first, I found it very strange—not only when I was hiking up in the mountains, but also just living in Denver. Denver’s a beautiful city with a lot of energy, but it’s also right where the high plains meet the Rockies, which rise just beyond the city out of nowhere. A lot of the suburban neighborhoods are irrigated, so it feels like a place that shouldn’t necessarily be there. I was very conscious of water in a way that I hadn’t been living on the East Coast. There were very bad wildfires my first summer there, which is a pretty normal occurrence, but it was something that I had to get used to.
All of that felt strange and big and terrifying, and I wanted to learn how to think about the forces that shaped the West as they kind of came into my life on a very local and personal level, and also as they were part of a much bigger picture.
When I moved to Denver, I thought I would stay there, but I’m subject to the whims of the academic job market. The title of the book originally was Elevation, because I thought it was going to be the book in which I established myself as a poet of the Rocky Mountain West. And then a lot of things happened. It’s not really a book about the pandemic, but a lot of it was written during the pandemic. It was written during a period of infertility, a period in which I felt like I was waiting for a lot of things to resolve. The life that I had imagined as permanent started to feel like it was transitional or provisional in some way. The period of time I was living through ended up being much stranger than I had thought it was when I started writing the book. It became very clear that Elevation was the wrong title for the book. It wasn’t an ecstatic book. It wasn’t even so much a book about a place.
CW: I love what you said about having to learn to see, like you were sort of training yourself to see the West.
LT: I think it’s important that poems come out of a place of not knowing. I often feel like I don’t have any wisdom that I’m writing to convey. I don’t have any sense of the way things are. I’m writing to find out, and often what I find out is that I actually don’t know. And that seems important.
CW: I’d like to talk about the two emotional states living beneath the surface of these poems. One is a sense of “wrongness,” set up in the epigraph by Adrienne Rich, “If you took the turn off, it was for you.” The second emotion is this stoic resolve or acceptance of that wrongness, reinforced by this experience of being held by the mountains. How does that reading land for you?
LT: Often I feel a deep sense of wrongness, especially on a larger scale. I’m in Paris right now. There’s this incredible heat wave. I’ve never experienced anything like it in this city. When I was in Denver, it was the smoke from wildfires. I’m reading about ICE shooting people in the United States. You’d have to be living under a rock not to feel a sense of deep and pervasive wrongness about the world. At the same time, in some ways, acceptance comes from a sense of beauty. It’s difficult to hold the two things in tension. I was experiencing infertility and having miscarriages. I also started to feel like the wrongness was part of my body. That was not something that I had intended to write about necessarily, but it was something that ended up being an important part of the book.
CW: A beautiful part. I wonder if you see yourself in the tradition of ecopoetics or nature poetry? I think about the Romantics or the agrarians who were trying to elevate the natural world in order to be consumed by it or immersed in its beauty, despite the threats of industrialization.
LT: I’ve been reluctant to call myself a nature poet or even an ecopoet. It took me a long time to realize that’s what I was by necessity. Part of it is that I grew up in Appalachia. I’ve always experienced the natural world as an important part of daily existence. It doesn’t necessarily matter where I am. Even in Paris, right now, there’s a baby pigeon living in our courtyard, and all the neighbors are feeding it. And my son is enjoying squirting it with a spray bottle, and the pigeon seems to really like that. If I were to write a poem about that, it would be a nature poem. But nature, in this case, is literally right in the middle of a courtyard. Right in the middle of human existence. I don’t know how to write a poem without including a place.
When I’m lost, or when a poem really isn’t working, I often find that what I need to do is return to the world around me and return to my body, and that’s part of nature. Nature and poetry are so fundamentally intertwined, and poetry is such an embodied practice. There’s really no way to separate the poet from the natural world in which she is inevitably living. I think even the Romantic poets and the Agrarians took account of wrongnesses and change and industrialization, etc.
CW: What would you say to a student who was leaning too hard into nostalgia or beauty in their poetry?
LT: Learning how to describe is really important. Leaning into beauty can be really important. But sometimes it’s a matter of widening parameters and seeing things as they really are and through the widest lens possible. When I have students who are writing kind of cliché nature poetry, it’s because they are writing what they think they need to be writing, rather than what they’re actually seeing. You see a beautiful tree, but what else do you see in the picture?
CW: That’s good advice. One of my favorite poems in the book is “Rabbits,” especially: “I planted a rose bush, I planted some daisies, … Mercilessly not watering the lawn, / Since in this life, it’s stupid to do anything / To prolong this life.” The description is incredibly enmeshed with the interiority of the speaker, but also descriptive from an objective standpoint. Those of us trying for those small daily things to thwart the larger existential things. “Rabbits” really got at that anxiety.
I’d like to move into body grief, the theme of infertility that comes into focus in the third section of the book. There are kind of quieter hints of it throughout. The first and last poem of the first section include the speaker crying out, but both instances are quite muted. I’m curious about your relationship with the “I” pronoun in the context of this grief.
LT: As the book took shape and as I moved from the title Elevation to Middle Slope, I was also thinking more about the importance of talking about infertility and miscarriage. I wrote an essay that appeared in The Atlantic in 2021 about miscarriage. I was thinking about what it was to be able to grieve a miscarriage when the issue of the unborn baby is increasingly politicized. It was a little bit hard for me to grieve without feeling like I was playing into the hands of a political position that would take my grief and use it against other women, and potentially against me. I was also very angry because miscarriage care and abortion care are essentially the same thing. At one point I had to wait for hours in the hospital for the drugs I needed because my doctor had to fill out some extra paperwork. They needed to make sure that I really, really needed it. After I wrote the essay, I began to hear from other women who thanked me for writing it.
I also got very interested in miscarriages in poems. Sylvia Plath has an amazing miscarriage poem called “Parliament Hill Fields.” Miscarriage and fertility are not talked about as much as they might be. Early-term miscarriages are an incredibly common experience. I thought this needed to be part of the book and a louder part of the book than I might otherwise have been inclined to let it be.
CW: I read your article. I loved the line, “It’s terrible to question your own loss like this. Was it possible that I had had nothing and therefore that I had lost nothing?”
LT: This is a little bit of what Sylvia Plath is writing about, too, in “Parliament Hill Fields.” It’s a kind of loss that doesn’t ever go away, and there’s nothing necessarily to memorialize it or to monumentalize it.
CW: Thinking of the book at large, with place grief, climate crisis, body grief . . . these are things that people can feel incredibly intensely in a quiet way and then feel gaslit by the many others who are sort of going along their merry way without the acute grief.
LT: Exactly. I think poetry is a place where those small and maybe otherwise invisible griefs can be held for a little while and explored, turned over, and stilled, a place for feeling that might be fleeting or feel minimal or not even worth paying attention to. A poem can be a container for that feeling—you put it there and see what grows from it.
CW: I especially loved “The No-Child Poem” and the repetition of this rose-cheeked child image. In early pregnancy, all you really have is these imagined futures, you know? The repetition of this rose-cheeked child, but then the speaker’s rejection of the image. The “no— / no, the mountains are distant” is zooming out quickly, disassociating from that grief. It was well done.
LT: Infertility is one of the strains that runs through the book. It’s not the only one. And I think it’s important to emphasize this multiplicity because it’s part of the sense of wrongness and waiting and stillness and time not advancing that the book is about. It was important for me that the book not be about one thing. It’s not just an infertility book or a book about a place. It’s not just a book about a contemporary moment and climate change. It’s a book about what it feels to be a person living in that time and place, and living in language, and trying to process it through language, and trying to use all the resources that poetic form and poetic language provide to get at it and get through it.
CW: I know that domesticity and labor in general have been dominant themes in your poetry and criticism. But Middle Slope feels a bit like a departure. Can you speak to that evolution?
LT: The book is still very much interested in the material world, the forces of work, activity, compensation, and economics that shape our lives, it’s all still there. But you’re right that the book itself isn’t quite as interested in the question of what work the speaker is performing, and how. As I parent a two-and-a-half-year-old, I think the poems that I’m writing now, which are not part of that book, are more of a return to thinking about domestic labor, but in a little bit of a palinode way, in that I’m sort of going back on some of the positions I took previously. I still think it’s really important, obviously, to recognize domestic work as work, but I find the work of parenting to be incredibly joyful and rewarding. Obviously, I wanted to have a child, but the joy of it all has been a big surprise for me, and so I’m actually trying to rewrite some of my earlier work, especially some of my earlier critical work, trying to rewrite that through the lens of experience in a way that takes into account what might be called a kind of doubleness in domestic work. Many writers and many women have found it to be something that takes them away from themselves, and that takes them away from their creative work. At the moment, because I’m really lucky in material conditions and support, I have found that it is an incredible, beautiful place from which to write poems.
CW: I listened to the episode of Close Readings in which you discuss Alice Notley. You shared that you interviewed her in Paris and asked her what her project was. I wanted to ask that of you, in terms of your body of work. What is your project?
LT: I forgot that I asked Alice that question. Really, I’m just trying to write poems. Every time I write a new poem, it feels like something new. Sometimes I write little series—I have a series of poems all called “Madonna,” for instance. Sometimes I get on a little jag and keep going with the same title. But I’m really just excited to see where language leads me and what a given alchemical combination of language, experience, emotion, and observation will produce next.
I am writing about parenting. I think the title for the next book will be Domesticity, although every time I think I know what a book is, something changes. I’m really just trying to write poems without thinking too much about the shape or structure or size or direction of the next book. At a certain point, I will take stock and see what’s there. There was never enough time to write before I had a kid, and there’s never enough time now. I’m really just trying to carve out the pockets of time at opportune moments and see what happens.
CW: I found a footnote for your Essays on Working, and I just laughed. You write: “I experience work, domestic work as well as academic work, as ambivalence: doing the work but not the way others do the work, doing the work exactly the way others do the work, thinking about it while doing or not doing it, doing it mindlessly, wondering about how or why I do it, wanting to do it, not wanting to do it, wanting it to be transformative, finding it deadly, doing it to escape other kinds of labor, resenting it for taking away from other kinds of work. I experience work, domestic work, as well as academic work, as ambivalence, doing the work, but not the way others do the work, doing the work exactly the way others do the work, thinking about it while doing it or not doing it, doing it mindlessly, wondering.”
I just was like, God, I wonder how she feels now adding parenting work into the mix. Kids are paradigm-shifting, you know? So I am curious how your work will evolve, especially around the idea of labor.
LT: I’m curious, too! I’m trying to figure it out.
