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?