Mayflies, Paperback

Every summer, mayflies swarm the shores of Lake St. Clair for a week's time, before their bodies dry up and scatter like ashes. Set inside the blue-collar automotive town of Windsor, Ontario, Mayflies traces the trajectory of adolescence into adulthood: A personal inventory of "glass-specked streets and shuttered storefronts" and "open wounds and eyesores" that follows in the wake of the 2008 recession. Cassandra Caverhill captures urban decline and imagines the road ahead as pockmarked and pot-holed, with opportunities dissolving beneath the weight of semitrucks.

These narrative poems explore how place colors possibility and affects relationship; how the absence of feeling is filled by obliteration. Using sharp textural images and a keen self-awareness, the poet weaves her own struggles with Windsor's, chronicling the city's descent as though it were a loved one lost.