An Evening with Lindsay Turner and Laura Kolbe

About the books:

MIDDLE SLOPE
Set primarily in the suburban West, below the peaks of the Rocky Mountains--land of cold snaps and blinding sun, dusty urban sprawl and wayward wildlife-- Middle Slope is about mountain ecologies, the changing climate, infertility, and uncertainty.

Between the extremes of peaks and valleys, the poet finds herself on the "middle slope," in a stilled, failed, and frozen time. Lindsay Turner's third collection is carnal, intimate, chthonic, and animal. These are nature lyrics, but with a view of nature that is distinctly contemporary, a vision of the natural world that is by us endangered and from which we are alienated. Through repetition, striking imagery, and simple expressive language gone awry, these poems capture a deep, slow thawing, things beginning to ease up and open. Contrasting the cyclical nature of seasonal change with the ruptures and comings-together of the romantic dyad, Turner captures a transformation that is both everyday and sublime.

THE DECADENT MOVEMENT
A book-length suite of poems that spins backward in time through the early days of parenthood and the preceding nine months of pregnancy. Beginning a year after childbirth in the harried throes of marriage and parenting, the collection proceeds toward its finale "Minus Time," which marvels at death's near-identical twin - that infinite period of nonexistence that precedes each new life. From the opening poem "Afterword," each dated poem slides backward in time, with the poem "Hinge" at the manuscript's midpoint spoken from the moment of childbirth.

This unraveling of a predicament by playing it in reverse - "Muybridged / out so anyone could see, framed, a woman / running for her life" - allows for rigorously honest accounting of mixed feelings about motherhood and its accompanying physical and psychic changes, detached from the readymade tropes of the "pregnancy plot."

The Decadent Movement is a book about the fear of loss (of sexual personhood, bodily self-determination, the ability to write, and the license to be headlong and volatile). Yet it is also about the need to insist on new terms of engagement with those we love, new languages of willfulness and desire.

About the authors:

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.

Laura Kolbe is a physician, medical ethicist, and writer. Her first collection, Little Pharma (University of Pittsburgh, 2021), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her chapbook Keeping House: Six Longer Love Poems (2025) was selected by Kwame Dawes as the Center for Book Arts annual contest winner. Her poems haveappeared in the Best American Poetry series and in American Poetry Review, The Baffler, Conjunctions, Harper’s, n+1, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, the Calderwood Foundation, the James Merrill House, and Millay Arts. She lives in New York City.

Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator. Please contact events@lostcitybookstore.com with questions.

Dato de accesibilidad: Este evento toma lugar en el segundo piso y Lost City Books no tiene ascensor. Favor de contactar events@lostcitybookstore.com con cualquiera duda.