'The visitor, the guest. The settler, the host. The pariah. Chatelaine is a collection of poems that thrive in the constructed landscape of lyric poetry. They present a mossy, alien cosmology where aeroplanes are forest-like and ‘signifiers turn to pulp outside the window’. Treating voice as a form of occupation and possession, each poem is keenly aware of the space it claims. Together they invite and exorcise fantasies of metamorphosis, reincarnation and belonging – a language and mood inherited through genealogy, an ethics of kin.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph: Look out the window. And doesn't this remind you of when you were in the boat, and then later that night you were lying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, "Why is it that the landscape in moving, but the boat is still?" Dead Man (Dir. Jim Jarmusch)
Native is a language, can't you read? 'Ask' The Smiths.
'Bonny Cassidy’s Chatelaine is a gift to a reviewer that doesn’t want to paraphrase poems, for a reader that doesn’t need such summarising. Rather, its line-up of loosely framed lyrics offers opportunities for thinking and (re)reading. Cassidy’s figure of the chatelaine, or key-keeper, lives, or moves, somewhere in between the reader and the poet. There are keys being kept but they are not in a predetermined place, nor, I suspect, are there any predetermined keyholes either. Whether or not this seems like hedge-betting will reflect your idea of what literature is for, or what it does.' (Introduction)
'Bonny Cassidy’s Chatelaine is a gift to a reviewer that doesn’t want to paraphrase poems, for a reader that doesn’t need such summarising. Rather, its line-up of loosely framed lyrics offers opportunities for thinking and (re)reading. Cassidy’s figure of the chatelaine, or key-keeper, lives, or moves, somewhere in between the reader and the poet. There are keys being kept but they are not in a predetermined place, nor, I suspect, are there any predetermined keyholes either. Whether or not this seems like hedge-betting will reflect your idea of what literature is for, or what it does.' (Introduction)
