Nectarine

Memory—how we retrieve and replenish it—is at the heart of Nectarine, Chad Campbell‘s visionary second collection. Figures, cities, and landscapes from the author’s life shift in and out of these dreamlike poems that explore the “unaccountable, uncountable” ways in which our past keeps speaking to us: through objects, through paintings, through colours, and through the spectre of places that map themselves over the places we live in. Subtle, unsettling, compressed, and full of incandescently beautiful language, Nectarine is about lost things, stranded moments, and traces preserved in time like “a glass of frozen nectarine halves / on a table made of ice.”

Reviews

“Imagine an image hitting the eye with rapid-fire description, as if it were projected through a television that allowed the viewer to delight in the flicker of each frame. This is the technique Campbell favors.” –Jim Johnstone, Carousel

“An unwavering look at mental health, addiction, and the immigrant experience. Using plainspoken, but moving language, Campbell uses long form sequences to paint a complex picture of the wraithlike way past generations of family affect the future.” —James Lindsay, Open Book

“One of the strongest books of poetry I’ve read this year, and easily among the best debut collections I’ve read in years.” –Robert Moore, The Partisan

“Chad Campbell’s poems are the guests that stay behind after the party long enough to “hear the silence sweep the voices back inside itself,” the embers of a fire lit inside the mind where it refuses to be extinguished.” – D.A. Powell