Placeholder
Description
Disintegration, gaps in the historical record, and unaccounted-for absences hold these magically makeshift lyric poems together.
Provisional, roaming, obsessed with remnants and deferrals, the poems in Charmaine Cadeau's second collection navigate flexible and shifting terrains where the speaker's emotional directness tethers us as we dare to read on. Though Cadeau is capable of some stunning acrobatics-somersaulting mid-line, the imagery defying gravity, the language a series of wows-she isn't in the business of showing off; instead, she goes subtly beyond the quotidian in search of that which saves the day or ruins the soufflé; or makes us all squirm in self-recognition. She dares the extraordinary to become a part of everyday. To read Placeholder is to enter a mesmerizing stream of consciousness response to a world that is rarely in the same spot in the morning as we left it the night before.
"As if anything could be safely
sealed away...
As if everything helps itself,
helplessly. Guided by breadcrumbs, the
flannel of porch light."
-from "Side Effects"
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Charmaine Cadeau was born in Toronto. Her first collection of poetry, What You Used to Wear, was published with Goose Lane in 2004. She is currently Assistant Professor at High Point University in North Carolina.