Placebo Effects: Poems

Book excerpt: Winner of the l996 National Poetry Series, judged and selected by William Matthews. "This collection of beguiling poems . . . takes as its avenue into experience the palpable, quotidian objects of the intimate environment. A barometer, an arrangement of flowers, a vase, a carpet, a pyramid of oranges in a city marketplace are seen and then entered as one might enter the action of a film. . . . There is something of the child's wondrous way of seeing the world that electrifies." — Boston Globe "Jeanne Beaumont's poems are smart and full of feeling, heartbreakingly in love with the snares and clarities of the language she writes in, and lit throughout by a kind of wry wonder." — William Matthews "How rare to discover so sly and disarming, so luminous and compelling a debut." — David St. John