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"

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.

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