“Elevation,” a Poem by Lindsay Turner
From the Collection Middle Slope
We drove up the mountain at night.
Something was wrong.
A miasma, a real miasma, you’d say.
The chicken farms franchise themselves
until they fill the land.
The stink.
We drove up to a waterfall in daylight.
Something was wrong, even in the recreation place.
A real miasma—oh marvelous, they say
watching the water file, filing down
and down to hazy lowlands.
The spray, particulate.
At night again and home.
Something is always wrong.
A miasma. Pause. Something is wrong, no one says,
because we’re all polite with one another.
Oncoming lights in fog out on the road, then nothing.
Unhappy, the women have bought too much again.
The discontent, humid and chirping.
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Excerpted from Middle Slope by Lindsay Turner. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Lindsay Turner. All rights reserved.
Lindsay Turner
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.
