Witness to the Great Unsettling

The poet Marianne Moore is credited with describing what poets do as "the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Perhaps that is why it has taken a poet, Paul Kingsnorth, an Englishman who now lives in Ireland, to craft a compelling portrait not of a toad in an imaginary garden, but of the relentless march of the machine in the human world. In Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Kingsnorth offers a fresh take on an old question: How can we know when the technologies we have built to serve us instead end up enslaving us? Or, what happens when the toad destroys the garden?