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Poetry Women Authors

Placeholder

by (author) Charmaine Cadeau

Publisher
Brick Books
Initial publish date
Apr 2013
Category
Women Authors, Canadian
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781771314107
    Publish Date
    Feb 2015
    List Price
    $11.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781926829814
    Publish Date
    Apr 2013
    List Price
    $20.00

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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"

About the author

Charmaine Cadeau grew up in Streetsville, Ontario. She is a graduate of Trent University and Queen’s University. She has a Master’s degree in creative writing from the University of New Brunswick and is working on a PhD in English and creative writing at the State University of New York at Albany.

Charmaine Cadeau's profile page

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