The Second Split Between is a poetry collection, and the book was the winner of the 2021 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast poets.

Alison Turner evolved much of this collection during the pandemic lock-down, and yet, paradoxically, the enforced limitation seems to have opened up and sharpened the realm of memory, her powers of both observation and imagination, and heightened her engagement with small piercing experiences.  I'm most surprised by the variety of these poems, which might begin with a storm gathering over the Hollywood sign, specie names of pigeons or:  "Things happen on the radio while you just stand there./A lion kills a dog and charges the cops, the cops decide/to call it a day and so does the lion...."     Finally, though, it is some common core of silence that seems to hold these poems together. I have not lately, nor even before lately, read a poetry collection that comes closer to touching that silence, that mystery.        ---  Suzanne Lummis           

“A well-written, fully realized manuscript. Impressionistic view of the pandemic, moments opened up and explored, a couple who lives within the confined world of their house of mirrors looking out at the abandoned world beyond. Other apocalyptic scenarios follow, earthquake warnings, emergencies, accidents, shootings, drug deals, the seasonal shifts of global warming, all under the banner of the battered Hollywood sign, greater L.A.  with all its sights, sounds, smells, flora and fauna, people and stories: a homeless man on his knees shining a star on Hollywood Blvd with a rag.  And amid all the quiet and confusion of a liminal, limited life, there are moments to seize and hold onto.”

"O ephemera, time is filled with us. Let us praise everything against the nothing. I too have posed with Superman on a dare. September, two crows watching, the light about to change."

 ---Dorianne Laux

Alison Turner lives with her husband under the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles, California. She received a JD from the UCLA School of Law and, during the years of a busy appellate practice, reserved the hours of 5-7am for reading and writing poems. Her poems have been published in Nimrod, Mid-American Review, Hudson Review, San Pedro River Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies. She is author of the chapbook, What To Do In An Emergency.  This will be her first full collection.