Like the insomniac who roams through this lively collection's title piece, the poems of Placebo Effects are characterized by wakefulness and restlessness. Employing precise language they create a universe - one that is both idiosyncratic yet oddly familiar. Beaumont's poems move beyond observation and personal experience - thus every object is treated as artifact or talisman, and every memory takes part in history's process.

Here, an eye test evokes the limits and wonders of divine and human vision; buying flowers begins a meditation on difference and kinship; a seemingly inert barometer becomes a keen tracker of both physical and social weathers. These are poems "woven to rove through time, dwelling to dwelling."