Songs & Ballads

Songs & Ballads by Turner, Lindsay. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780990703037.

Poetry. "Lindsay Turners ravishing SONGS & BALLADS takes account of colors, architectures, skies, and the many ways the world is speculatively used and re-used for short-term ends. When to refrain? Refrain now, hold back from harm now, hold on to the world now and now, these elegiac, mysteriously worldy poems sing."--Catherine Wagner "The sunlight was prettier for its uneven distribution, observes Lindsay Turner, alerting us to the collectivist imperative subtending perception itself. Oh share it, share it. SONGS & BALLADS re-imagines historical poetics--whats the ragged quatrains job?--as a critique of our unsustainable political economies. Employing recursive forms from the Medieval ballad to Modernisms differential repetitions, Turners contemporary stanzas in meditation remediate a range of arrangements / demanding attention for the continuous present. Whether it be the pentagons of space in the chainlink or what the animals we saw never knew, we find, in this work, a world on the verge: all systems go and some places broken."--Srikanth Reddy "Witty, mordant, despairing, yet peculiarly refreshing poems: Lindsay Turner has done the thing few can do--she has made lyric critical; she makes thought sing. Tuesday and I want an image / of the ecological condition / these raindrops just arent normal." These are incantations of and against a seeping duress--with weird skies, ugly offices, bank holidays, ominous weather, bad feelings and wrong life. Her antennae quiver in this mood of disaster, as her poems become a keeper of our collective distress. Songs, ballads, ditties, fractured meditations: these poems offer a countermeasure, a countersong against the modern regime of blighting calculation. With their beguiling and wrong-footing music, these poems keep time and keep our time; they are insistent, seductive, surprising. The ocean, love, a days measure: are they nothing to us? Are we good for nothing? Keenly intelligent poems of dispossession and divestiture, they crack a smart whip in their ludic and paradoxically soulful deadpan."--Maureen N. McLane