Lindsay Turner's "Elevation" Turns a Foggy Drive Into Warning

Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish Lindsay Turner's collection Middle Slope in October 2026, and the poem "Elevation," excerpted ahead of release, shows exactly how the book works.

The poem opens with a plain declarative scene: "We drove up the mountain at night." Then comes the turn — "Something was wrong." That two-beat pattern, setting followed by diagnosis, repeats three times across the piece and becomes its engine.

What is the poem actually about?

Turner builds the poem around a single word: miasma. It's an older term for a polluted, bad-smelling atmosphere once blamed for spreading disease. The speaker first applies it literally. Chicken farms, she writes, "franchise themselves / until they fill the land. / The stink." Industrial agriculture has colonized the landscape, and the poem refuses to look away.

The second stanza moves the scene to daylight and a waterfall — "even in the recreation place," something is wrong. Turner's sharpest irony lands here: "A real miasma—oh marvelous, they say / watching the water file, filing down / and down to hazy lowlands. / The spray, particulate." Tourists admire the view while breathing the same contamination. The repetition of "file, filing" turns the waterfall into a bureaucratic image, a procession of water marching somewhere it shouldn't go.

The final stanza brings the poem home, at night again. "Something is always wrong," the speaker concedes — but "no one says" it, "because we're all polite with one another." That line is the poem's social critique. Politeness becomes a form of complicity, a way of agreeing not to notice.

Turner closes with two compressed images. First, "Oncoming lights in fog out on the road, then nothing" — a moment of near-miss driving that mirrors the poem's alternation between perception and denial. Second: "Unhappy, the women have bought too much again. / The discontent, humid and chirping." Consumer comfort stands in for political speech; the ambient unease is literally in the air, humid and insect-like.

What does this change for readers?

It signals a poet working in an ecological register without lecturing. Turner's method is observational: she names the degradation (factory farms, particulate spray), names the social mechanism that hides it (manners), and lets the contradiction sit. The fog on the night road — the image that anchors the whole piece — works as both weather and metaphor, and she never has to say so.

Middle Slope arrives from FSG in October 2026. Readers who want the full arc of the book — how Turner sustains this mixture of landscape, complaint and restraint across a collection — will find out then.