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,
is about lost things, stranded moments, and traces preserved in time like “a glass of frozen nectarine halves / on a table made of ice.”