Placebo effects
Subtitle: poems
By: Jeanne Marie Beaumont.
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: The National poetry series
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 86
Description: Like the insomniac who roams through this lively collection's title piece, the poems of Placebo Effects are characterized by wakefulness and restlessness. Employing precise language they create a universe - one that is both idiosyncratic yet oddly familiar. Beaumont's poems move beyond observation and personal experience - thus every object is treated as artifact or talisman, and every memory takes part in history's process.

Here, an eye test evokes the limits and wonders of divine and human vision; buying flowers begins a meditation on difference and kinship; a seemingly inert barometer becomes a keen tracker of both physical and social weathers. These are poems "woven to rove through time, dwelling to dwelling."
Notes: "Winner of the 1996 National poetry series."