Brian Laidlaw
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The Mirrormaker
Poet-songwriter Brian Laidlaw’s second collection The Mirrormaker overlays the boom-and-bust cycle of young love – based in part on Bob Dylan’s high-school romance with his “Girl From the North Country” – atop the boom-and-bust cycle of mining economics in Dylan’s hometown on Minnesota’s Iron Range. The book includes a companion album of original music written and performed by the author; together, these poems and songs explore the ways in which, in a certain extractive mindset, the beloved and the landscape become nothing more than mirrors in which the beholder sees himself. “Laidlaw is a poet, a singer, and a musician of our time. He brews a discordancy into the harmony. His masterful Mirrormaker takes as part of its subject Echo, the strangely prescient name of Bob Dylan’s high school sweetheart (and also the mythological Echo, doomed to repeat only what Narcissus said as he stared into his own reflection). Laidlaw is a futuristic country poet singer in the other side of the century’s mirror, where consumption, celebritifying, and commodification rule as the earth rots from the inside out. Calling “what is killing what” and “the sick of the fields,” Laidlaw is singing the trails and singeing the words as he hears “an alternate gospel.” When he writes, “the replica me heartbreaking the replica you,” one wonders at the possibilities of love, of sincerity in simulacra. Brian Laidlaw is living proof that the bard is still with us.” – Gillian Conoley “Brian Laidlaw reinvented the moon and he didn't even have to go to outer space to do it. He is an inner space man. A stargazer, vagabond, singer and poet cut from the American grain, dreamswept like a prairie at night and fiery as a smelting stack. His words resonate with the homespun echo of a cigarbox guitar, and report with a crack of thunder. How lucky to have this new collection of his poems.” – D. A. Powell
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