Books by Lachlan Mackinnon

Personal accounts are at the heart of Closing Sysco, where each story reveals the cultural, political, and historical ramifications of industrial closure in Sydney, Nova Scotia, the former steel city of Atlantic Canada.

A book about refugees, reality television, detective shows, number-theory, Shakespeare's brothers, ecology, and a marriage.

Lachlan MacKinnon's fourth collection opens with a gathering of lyrics and descriptive poems: observing rites of passage (elegies, wedding poems), offering nuanced accounts of places and their patchwork afterlives (the Midlands, a Suffolk sketchbook), or meditations on historical figures introspectively at odds with their time (King Canute, Edward Thomas). This preoccupation with contingency - personal and historical - opens onto The Book of Emma: a long poem of fifty-four sections, written mostly in prose, which address a lost friend and contemporary in terms which seem laconically factual, but which draw their power from archaic conventions (Egyptian, Celtic) of talking to the dead.

Acknowledgements - Introduction - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Conclusion - Notes - Works Cited - Index