Brian Laidlaw

Part adventure narrative, part philosophical inquiry, and part love letter to climbing and natural spaces, Erratica is a radiant exploration of what happens when a human body meets the earth with full attention.

After Brian Laidlaw climbed El Capitan, Yosemite’s iconic stone monolith, he found himself facing a repeated question: “So, what was it like up there?” It isn’t enough, he knows, to just to describe the sensation of the rock beneath his hands and feet—a climb is so much more than physical movement.

Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love.

These poems relocate the myth of Echo and Narcissus to the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota. Drawing inspiration from the high school relationship between Bob Dylan and Echo Helstrom, they do with language what miners have always done to the earth: peel back the layers and extract what lies below the surface.