Songs That Remind Us of Factories

The poems in Songs that Remind Us of Factories explore how we remain connected: to the world outside, to our ideas of home, to each other, and to ourselves. In their searching, these magpie poems strike a balance between wound language and quiet meditation, the arched-brow wisecrack and the emotionally frank gesture. The result is an honest and playful sequence of poems that plumb our myriad reactions when small wildernesses occasionally come inside.

The book’s final section asks whether we may not be too connected. They mine a world of rapid technological and commercial growth for its poetic potential, focusing on work in call centres, postmodern spaces where the walls of dying suburban malls have been repurposed with fishnets of fibre-op and chain gangs of chopped desktop/Dells ; where you’re licked/ before the call comes kicking in.

This is a poetry that refuses to stagnate in one mode, wearing all manner of poetic hats while always avoiding drab lyrical sentiment. With a jumpy musicality and a taut line, these poems wander far, zeroing in on moments of daily connection while also opening wider their frame of reference to explore the often fractured links we have to family and loss, science and religion, the idealized rural and the newly urban.