This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Turner, whose poetry collection Middle Slope is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “It was spring in the mountains but we were all down here,” Turner writes in one of the book’s early verses. “Down here the mind is best at things that melt / Although it isn’t very good at those even / Always outdone by the things that flourish most when nobody sees them.” Middle Slope explores the ecologies and environs of the suburban sprawl beneath the Rocky Mountains, paying careful attention to natural phenomena and human feeling-states that often go unnoticed. Through poems that are at once spare and lyrical, Turner watches attentively as the light grows long and the leaves turn brown, venturing down slopes and then back up again. In a starred review for Library Journal, Lisa Gieskes calls Turner “the consummate poet’s poet…. Her words build like chord progressions, taking readers on a journey that is at once solitary and communal.” And poet Maggie Millner adds that Middle Slope “achieves that subtlest of poetic feats: to ennoble the natural world without abstracting it from human life.” Lindsay Turner is the author of The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018). She has also translated the books of Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantell, Stéphane Bouquet, and others from French. Her translation of Bouquet’s The Next Loves (Nightboat Books, 2019) was longlisted for the ALTA National Translation Award, shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, and named a New York Times notable poetry collection of 2019. She lives in Cleveland, where she is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Case Western Reserve University.
Lindsay Turner, author of Middle Slope.
1. How long did it take you to write Middle Slope?
I started writing the poems in the book when I moved to Denver in 2019 and finished them when we moved to Cleveland in 2022. I’ve been tinkering since, but the poems themselves were written in that three-year span.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The period the book describes was a hard one. I was going through a bunch of miscarriage-related medical complications that felt endless, and there was a global pandemic, and my husband and I had jobs in different states, and it wasn’t clear what my life was or was going to be—and so the most challenging thing about writing the book was living through it.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write poetry wherever and whenever I need to, often in bed, rarely at my desk, usually longhand, although once I wrote a poem on my phone at a kids’ birthday party, hiding in a corner and pretending to be texting. I don’t write poetry every day but I try to write something—notes in a journal, notes to friends, a sentence towards a prose project.
4. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been on a fiction kick for a long time and am currently reading books by Gwendoline Riley [such as] Opposed Positions (Jonathan Cape, 2012) and Nancy Lemann [such as] The Ritz of the Bayou (Knopf, 1987) [and her] nonfiction. I’m trying to be better about reading contemporary poetry; after I finish answering these questions I’m going to spend an hour with Graham Foust’s Close Second Person (Flood Editions, 2026). I also have to reread Milton’s “Lycidas” for the graduate seminar I teach tomorrow. I’m picking away at all the biographies of Elizabeth Bishop at once. I have Dorieann Ní Ghríofa’s Said the Dead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026) on my nightstand. With my kid, we’re always reading Blueberries for Sal (Viking, 1948), Brave Irene (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (Walker Books, 1989), The Little Island (Doubleday, 1946), or Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (Western Publishing Company, 1974).
5. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book?
I grew up hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains in southern Appalachia with my family, and I think the idea of an actual, physical “middle slope” is linked to a memory I have of getting caught on a ridge in a thunderstorm—we scurried off the ridge, down a pretty steep slope but not all the way down, because that’s where it might flood, and waited it out beneath a big rhododendron. I remember that it was my birthday.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
It’s probably the need to earn money for, say, health insurance and a mortgage and to send my kid to college eventually. I’m lucky enough to have a good academic job—I love many parts of it, especially my students. Before I had a child I worried that having a family would be an obstacle to my writing, as it has been over the centuries for so many women in particular. To my surprise, and because I have a ton of material and emotional support, I’ve found parenting to be supremely joyful and rewarding. It opens my heart and inspires me and folds back into writing in so many unexpected ways. I can’t say the same for other kinds of work. This is less a complaint than an argument for affordable housing and socialized health care!
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
There isn’t a phrase that sticks out, but throughout the process and still [now], I’ve been awed and moved by my agent’s and editor’s trust and patience and belief in the poems. I’m a pretty impatient person by nature—I feel like I have a lot to say and do in this life—and I was nervous about it all. My agent and editor showed me how to be patient and to trust the work, and I am so grateful.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Middle Slope, what would you say?
I’d want to appear to myself like a Biblical angel: Be not afraid!
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Middle Slope?
I was translating a lot while I was writing the book—poetry, but also theory and philosophy. I need to have a thousand things going at once, always, and so translation’s a good thing to have on deck when I’m stuck [on] writing but need to do something. The book’s years were the pandemic years, so like everyone I was baking bread and (briefly) brewing kombucha. We moved houses every year, too—that’s work. We planted big gardens, okra and squash and cucumbers and peppers and tomatoes and sunflowers and wildflowers, and Denver’s so dry that they needed watering constantly, especially the cucumbers. In our last little house, the backyard when we moved in was covered over with Astroturf, hideously, so we took it up and tried to xeriscape the space ourselves. There were many, many hours of ripping up green plastic-y stuff and then hauling and spreading gravel.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s impossible to pick a single piece of advice. Jorie Graham, my first poetry teacher, taught us that poetry is grounded in the body and the world. Whenever I get stuck, I turn back to the senses and the outside—to what the air feels like, what the light is doing, to as much of the world beyond myself as I can possibly let in. Part of that outside is reading, too: I’m also reading a brilliant book of essays on poetry by Denise Riley, A Chorus of Ears (Picador, 2026), that I can’t stop thinking about, about how little sense it makes to think of an individual poet’s voice, since we’re all made up, wonderfully, of the voices we hear and read. And part of that outside is also just living: At many points along the line, I’ve been reassured that all the life things that seem like they might endanger writing—parenting, especially—are what make the work happen, as long as you can manage to give the work the time it needs, somehow.
