Many of the poems in The Missing Months occupy the strange hiatus afforded by lockdown. They look forward as well as back, toying with possible futures, enthused by utopian dreams or fearing cultural and bodily entropy. They celebrate and mourn the lives of friends and relatives, captivated by carefully tended images from the past. Lockdown's 'missing months' in the world of a four-year-old granddaughter are laid down and remembered for her. Familiar objects - a park bench, stones, grass, stars, windows - are reanimated. This poetry of imaginative journeying 'stretches/Banks on a slope of air and turns' like the heron it watches. Between the crackle of radio signals and rain, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the American singer Miranda Lambert, here is a poet in search of points of reference, the 'bright fresh leaves' of sunlight among the ruins.
Lachlan MacKinnon's fourth collection opens with a gathering of lyrics and descriptive poems: observing rites of passage (elegies, wedding poems), offering nuanced accounts of places and their patchwork afterlives (the Midlands, a Suffolk sketchbook), or meditations on historical figures introspectively at odds with their time (King Canute, Edward Thomas). This preoccupation with contingency - personal and historical - opens onto The Book of Emma: a long poem of fifty-four sections, written mostly in prose, which address a lost friend and contemporary in terms which seem laconically factual, but which draw their power from archaic conventions (Egyptian, Celtic) of talking to the dead.
If you don't like this book, then you like garbage! -Michael D'Amico A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh. -Stephen King The word genius is thrown around way too easily these days. -Lachlan MacKinnon Ever spend the summer in a body cast? Have you ever been served months old sun-dried garlic bologna for dinner? Ever eat over 2 dozen donuts for a few bucks? Did your dad ever help you buy a car with one of his aliases? Lachlan MacKinnon's debut collection takes us through tales of growing up in working class Cleveland, Ohio. As the middle child in a large dysfunctional family, he recounts his upbringing with self-deprecation and hilarity despite some heartbreaking circumstances. No one is his life is spared. Lachlan with a cast of unique supporting characters will take you to another time and cracking up all the way.
Doves is Lachlan Mackinnon's most candid and affecting volume of poems to date, and follows on from Small Hours, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2010. Formally dexterous and inventive, these inclusive, approachable poems welcome all-comers in their broad-minded address: refugees, reality television, detective shows, number-theory, Shakespeare's brothers, ecology, a marriage. Wherever it turns, the poetry remains courageously sociable and moral, ever concerned with honouring lives and good deeds, and asking what can be saved from the ruins of what is lost by individuals, cultures and civilisations. But for all its outward gaze, its cares speak privately too - of crises in personal action and belief, of friends and intimacies disturbed and renewed - and, underpinning it all, an urging to account for our behaviour and 'to start to answer / to ourselves for what we have made of life.'Doves is an uplifting account of recovery that makes no stranger of despair. But with each moment of despondency comes a tough-minded - even humorous - response that tempers grief, and bolsters our equipment for living, and in so doing extends a timeless ring around the heart of this thoughtful, inspiriting and memorable book.
The Jupiter Collisions, Lachlan Mackinnon's third collection, opens with a characteristically exact account of something ungraspable: a distant episode in cosmology. This is the starting point for a series of investigations into uncertainty and flux, in which poem after poem brings home its cargo in precisely shaped but oblique and surprising ways. The collection is as various in its concerns as it is unified in its search for the close naming of things. One of the paradoxes of these poems is to start from spareness and reserve, and to end by establishing an intensely personal voice, whatever the subject almost casually to hand - American scenes, foreign places, the remembered present of the 1960s, the lives within paintings, the potentiality of prime numbers. The Jupiter Collisions includes two subtle and intriguingly constructed sequences of linked poems, in which the canvas of personal matter (loss, love, contingency) is stretched across a frame of philosophical concerns, in a poetry which is as unafraid of thinking - 'the heaven of ideas' - as it is firmly vested in 'the pointillisme of what is'. We come to recognise a tone, quietly distinctive, addressing the world in poems which are cool but numinous in their phrasing, moving in their understatement.
An eye-opening exploration of a unique region of Italy that bridges the Alps and the Adriatic Sea, featuring 80 recipes and wine pairings from a master sommelier and James Beard Award-winning chef. “An exhilarating journey, no passport required.”—Thomas Keller, chef/proprietor, The French Laundry Bordered by Austria, Slovenia, and the Adriatic Sea, the northeastern Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia is an area of immense cultural blending, geographical diversity, and idyllic beauty. This tiny sliver of land is home to one of the most refined food and wine cultures in the world and yet remains off the grid. The unique cuisine of Friuli is what inspires the menu at Frasca, a James Beard Award-winning restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, helmed by master sommelier Bobby Stuckey and chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson. Meaning “branch” or “bough,” the word frasca refers to the Friulian tradition of hanging a branch outside the family farm as a sign that new wine was available for sale. Friuli Food and Wine celebrates this practice and the wine and cuisine of the Friulian region through eighty recipes and wine pairings. Dishes such as Wild Mushroom and Montasio Fonduta, Chicken Marcundela with Cherry Mostarda and Potato Puree, Squash Gnocchi with Smoked Ricotta Sauce, and Whole Branzino in a Salt Crust are organized by Land, Sea, and Mountains, while profiles of local winemakers and wines, including Tocai, Ribolla Gialla, Malvasia Istriana, and Verduzzo, open up new pairing possibilities. Showcasing the best Friulian wines you can buy outside of Italy as well as restaurant and winery recommendations, this beautifully photographed cookbook, wine guide, and travelogue brings the delicious secrets of this untouched part of Italy into your home kitchen.
Closing Sysco presents a history of deindustrialization and working-class resistance in the Cape Breton steel industry between 1945 and 2001. The Sydney Steel Works is at the heart of this story, having existed in tandem with Cape Breton’s larger coal operations since the early twentieth century. The book explores the multifaceted nature of deindustrialization; the internal politics of the steelworkers’ union; the successful efforts to nationalize the mill in 1967; the years in transition under public ownership; and the confrontations over health, safety, and environmental degradation in the 1990s and 2000s. Closing Sysco moves beyond the moment of closure to trace the cultural, historical, and political ramifications of deindustrialization that continue to play out in post-industrial Cape Breton Island. A significant intervention into the international literature on deindustrialization, this study pushes scholarship beyond the bounds of political economy and cultural change to begin tackling issues of bodily health, environment, and historical memory in post-industrial places. The experiences of the men and women who were displaced by the decline and closure of Sydney Steel are central to this book. Featuring interviews with former steelworkers, office employees, managers, politicians, and community activists, these one-on-one conversations reveal both the human cost of industrial closure and the lingering after-effects of deindustrialization.
An eye-opening exploration of a unique region of Italy that bridges the Alps and the Adriatic Sea, featuring 80 recipes and wine pairings from a master sommelier and James Beard Award-winning chef. “An exhilarating journey, no passport required.”—Thomas Keller, chef/proprietor, The French Laundry Bordered by Austria, Slovenia, and the Adriatic Sea, the northeastern Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia is an area of immense cultural blending, geographical diversity, and idyllic beauty. This tiny sliver of land is home to one of the most refined food and wine cultures in the world and yet remains off the grid. The unique cuisine of Friuli is what inspires the menu at Frasca, a James Beard Award-winning restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, helmed by master sommelier Bobby Stuckey and chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson. Meaning “branch” or “bough,” the word frasca refers to the Friulian tradition of hanging a branch outside the family farm as a sign that new wine was available for sale. Friuli Food and Wine celebrates this practice and the wine and cuisine of the Friulian region through eighty recipes and wine pairings. Dishes such as Wild Mushroom and Montasio Fonduta, Chicken Marcundela with Cherry Mostarda and Potato Puree, Squash Gnocchi with Smoked Ricotta Sauce, and Whole Branzino in a Salt Crust are organized by Land, Sea, and Mountains, while profiles of local winemakers and wines, including Tocai, Ribolla Gialla, Malvasia Istriana, and Verduzzo, open up new pairing possibilities. Showcasing the best Friulian wines you can buy outside of Italy as well as restaurant and winery recommendations, this beautifully photographed cookbook, wine guide, and travelogue brings the delicious secrets of this untouched part of Italy into your home kitchen.
Many of the poems in The Missing Months occupy the strange hiatus afforded by lockdown. They look forward as well as back, toying with possible futures, enthused by utopian dreams or fearing cultural and bodily entropy. They celebrate and mourn the lives of friends and relatives, captivated by carefully tended images from the past. Lockdown's 'missing months' in the world of a four-year-old granddaughter are laid down and remembered for her. Familiar objects - a park bench, stones, grass, stars, windows - are reanimated. This poetry of imaginative journeying 'stretches/Banks on a slope of air and turns' like the heron it watches. Between the crackle of radio signals and rain, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the American singer Miranda Lambert, here is a poet in search of points of reference, the 'bright fresh leaves' of sunlight among the ruins.
Personal accounts are at the heart of Closing Sysco, where each story reveals the cultural, political, and historical ramifications of industrial closure in Sydney, Nova Scotia, the former steel city of Atlantic Canada.
Doves is Lachlan Mackinnon's most candid and affecting volume of poems to date, and follows on from Small Hours, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2010. Formally dexterous and inventive, these inclusive, approachable poems welcome all-comers in their broad-minded address: refugees, reality television, detective shows, number-theory, Shakespeare's brothers, ecology, a marriage. Wherever it turns, the poetry remains courageously sociable and moral, ever concerned with honouring lives and good deeds, and asking what can be saved from the ruins of what is lost by individuals, cultures and civilisations. But for all its outward gaze, its cares speak privately too - of crises in personal action and belief, of friends and intimacies disturbed and renewed - and, underpinning it all, an urging to account for our behaviour and 'to start to answer / to ourselves for what we have made of life.'Doves is an uplifting account of recovery that makes no stranger of despair. But with each moment of despondency comes a tough-minded - even humorous - response that tempers grief, and bolsters our equipment for living, and in so doing extends a timeless ring around the heart of this thoughtful, inspiriting and memorable book.
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