Chatelaine is a collection of poems peopled by characters who, like a family portrait, resemble one another in foxed, latent ways. Their voices stalk outside of time and place, inhabiting the genres of riddle, fragment, confession, lyric and ekphrasis, and returning to images of metamorphosis and occupation. The poems present a mossy, alien cosmology where aeroplanes are forest-like and ‘signifiers turn to pulp outside the window’. They also express a language and mood inherited through genealogy, an ethics of kin. With influences from Kabir to New Wave Australian cinema, Lucie Brock-Broido to Oceanic sculpture, they ask: who does the poem belong to? Who lives there and who comes to visit?
