These machines made of words are full of wit and quotidian splendour. Like Frank O’Hara and Bernadette Mayer, Laura Wetherington’s poems bridge the divide between art and life: motherhood, the materiality of language, living in the familiar foreign countries of our bodies. It offers the best of art generosity and wonder. It makes you glad to be alive. – Marcus Silcock
Little Machines begins as a procedural collection – a series of poems written on train commutes in the Netherlands – that then unravels into a vivid and visceral lyric document of how the narratives of work and parenthood collided in the living room during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Poetry’s necessary capacity to reimagine these life-governing narratives in a state of global emergency is clear, but what I find most affecting about these poems is how Wetherington’s expansion of the concept of “place” leads to a translingual inquiry in how parents and children can teach each other new languages, and how borders, boundaries and lines can be redrawn as the iridescent color that lies between “uit” and “out,” “buiten” and babble, and “forgive me” and “the language lives in me." – Mia You
What can happen on a Dutch train? Quite a lot if you ride along with these ‘little machines’. From typical Dutch (rain, cows) to existentialism, from garden gnomes to Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3, Laura Wetherington finds wonder in the familiar and likeness in the strange. Each poem invites you to see the world anew, to find the magical in what seems mundane. Enchanting, profound and vibrant, these are poems to carry with you – wherever you go. – Milla van der Have
40pp