Hacker Packer
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A playfully inventive and invigorating debut collection of poetry from a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize.
With settings ranging from the ancient sites and lavish museums of Europe to the inner-city neighbourhood in North Central Regina where the poet grew up, the poems in Cassidy McFadzean’s startling first collection embrace myth and metaphysics and explore the contradictory human impulses to create art and enact cruelty. A child burn victim is conscripted into a Grade Eight fire safety seminar; various road-killed animals make their cases for sainthood; and the fantastical visions in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights move off the canvas and onto the speaker’s splendid pair of leggings. Precociously wise, formally dexterous, and unrepentantly strange, the poems in Hacker Packer present a wholly memorable poetic debut.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McFadzean's debut collection is a finely layered exploration of language and archetype rooted in mythology, history, intimate reflections, and more external ghosts. In its strata lie both discrete and delicately interwoven strands: the medieval Unicorn Tapestries are given galloping, irreverent voice; fire and water become focal points for meditations on identity and change; underworlds and iconography of the dead vie with depictions of Romanesques turned viciously on their heads, piety, and sainthood; and the intrusion and seamless melding of the modern upon the historical. Through the whole runs a vein of recurring notes a conversation held between the silt of the book's internal, delineated eras in both text and subtext. It is examined most directly in the naming puzzles in "I Smile Earwide," "His Arms Primed," "Leave Her and She Swells," "Beneath a Golden Altar," and "Born of a Wolf." Other, subtler notes also pervade, their presence giving the book a holistic cast rendered in bronze, atria, ossuaries, and gnosis. It is all unearthed in deliciously adroit wordplay and exploration of form, capped off in two perfect, mirrored closing notes one long, one short that leave the tongue still thirsty, tasting peaty, tilled earth. A most satisfying and accomplished collection.
