The Stuntman

“The Stuntman is a dazzling first book: an all-night thrill revival, a jamboree of ecstatic yawps. Brian Laidlaw is a poet of tremendous lyric gifts and emotive modulation, full of jubilance and unwavering freshness. The associative technique in each of these missives corkscrews and swerves through the broken world with dispatches of yearning, growing these big-hearted and fearless experiments of structure and voice into a gorgeously raw-throated orchestra.”

“‘The earth broke open cause we broke it open.’ Brian Laidlaw knows, as Bruce Chatwin wrote, that an unsung land is a dead land. The Stuntman resurrects sonic fragments of folk knowhow by threading them back through the thrashing heart of American lyric. He wrangles Bob Dylan’s idiot wind into the hothouse breath of each line’s conspiracy: ‘I am part of the collective / idiocy, the anthill a commons and a summons.’ In this gorgeous debut, he takes what’s common and small and stronger than it knows and bids it sing: ‘I have been staring at the sun long enough I’m ready to be the sun.’”

“These poems punch a hole right through the wall separating me from magic, leaping back and forth as if the wall were a fire—between the quotidian and the ecstatic, between a commons and a summons, breaking down antagonymic barriers so the sun shines through.”