The poems and non-fiction collected in Sputnik's Cousin rinse, relent and tumble in the slipstream of modernity. The indefatigable nature of objects how they reverberate in the proximity of others and become polished from anachronistic histories retold hum a progress charged by humanity's witless pursuit of technology and civility. MacCarter's poetry is a menagerie of Rube Goldberg contraptions; invoking idiom, definition, and refraction while harnessing the slope, speed and gravity of language to set in motion these absurdist machines. A light switch is turned off, but not by means of a flick: it took fracking in Russia, the building of a sand castle and a monastic jeep to do so. These are maximalist poems whose syntax is coerced through yoga ... poems of humour, warning and visceral sound.