Thursday, December 13, 2018, 7:00pm
Target Performance Hall
Open Book, 1011 S Washington Ave, Minneapolis

Milkweed Editions and Rain Taxi present the launch of Brian Laidlaw’s The Mirrormaker, his new poetry collection and its accompanying album. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for mingling and cocktails, and at 7 p.m. the program will kick off, featuring a mix of poetry, music, and conversation from Brian and poet/performer Douglas Kearney. Book signing to follow.

FREE! All are welcome.

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 . . . How lucky to have this new collection of his poems.
—D.A. Powell

A companion volume to The Stuntman, The Mirrormaker fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom. Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love.

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.

Douglas Kearney’s most recent collection, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), is a Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize winner, a CLMP Firecracker awardee, and California Book Award silver medalist. Publishers Weekly called Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015) “an extraordinary book.” He teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

Ashley Hanson is a theater artist based in Granite Falls, MN. She was awarded an Obama Foundation fellowship this year for her work in using the arts to help rural communities connect across difference, revitalize their rural spaces, and create new narratives across the United States.