Brian Laidlaw is the author of The Stuntman and The Mirrormaker. Widely published in journals and anthologies, he has had poems in New American Writing, Iowa Review, FIELD, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral; lyrics in American Songwriter Magazine; and a songwriting credit on the Grammy Award-winning album Can You Canoe? by the Okee Dokee Brothers. An accomplished musician, he has toured widely in the United States and Europe, and his most recent album is Amoratorium from Paper Darts Press. A graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in poetry, Laidlaw has taught songwriting at McNally Smith College of Music and is now pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver.
A companion volume to The Stuntman, this collection fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom. But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, these poems take their primary inspiration from Echo, drawing on ecocritical readings of American history.
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.
