Hacker Packer

(Paperback)

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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 of Greece and Rome to the museums of Europe, from the barracks of Auschwitz to the streets of North Central Regina, the inner-city neighbourhood where the poet grew up, the poems in Cassidy McFadzean's dazzling first collection embrace myth and metaphysics and explore the contradictory human impulses to create art and enact cruelty.

Reviews

"Artful as the mosaics, tapestries, and temples that are its subject matter, Hacker Packer is a vitrine of rich, striking contrasts and images arranged for the fortunate reader. In poem after poem of sure-footed lines, Cassidy McFadzean proves herself to be a gifted curator of the varied and temporal. An outstanding debut."
--David OMeara, author of Noble Gas, Penny Black

"The poems in Hacker Packer cross imaginative boundaries between human and animal, intimate strangers and mythical beasts, and traverse a self-scrutinizing frontier between pathos and mordant irony. McFadzean is as anxiously comfortable with the idiom of Justin Bieber as she is with that of bardic Old English, and maps her way across a densely laid path of sound and forms. Her work is a dazzling and sometimes threatening guidebook to an interior landscape of 'no sure footing we found we stood on.'"
--Mark Levine, author of The Wilds

Cassidy McFadzeans Hacker Packer packs a linguistic punch. In poems that are both baroque and contemporary, McFadzean demonstrates a knack for contrasting high and low culture to evoke a rich cultural ethos. Whether its Agamemnons tomb swarming with Beliebers or Selena Gomez lyrics dotting a poem that celebrates the night sky, Hacker Packer is guaranteed to keep readers off-balance with an irresistible mix of myth, history, and popular culture.
--Jury citation, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

"McFadzeans 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. . . . It is all unearthed in deliciously adroit wordplay and exploration of form, capped off in two perfect, mirrored closing notesone long, one shortthat leave the tongue still thirsty, tasting peaty, tilled earth. A most satisfying and accomplished collection."
--Publishers Weekly

"To read Cassidy McFadzeans debut collection is to peer into the processes of a gifted poet as she gathers her forces. The poems in Hacker Packer are characterized by enthusiasm and discovery. . . . Play is everything in this collection. It swings with gusto through extensive subject matter. These poems are joy, indulgence. They exercise the power of the written word to take a thing and turn it, topsy-turvy-wise towards something altogether new. . . . These poems are peacock-like displays of accomplished craft and intellect. They show enthusiasm for the contemporary Canadian poets who inhabit this kingdom of McFadzeans, where embellishments and grandiose spectacles take the forefront, sometimes shadowing the meat and guts of the poem, though always delighting. If the final poem in the collection is any indication of the trajectory of McFadzeans career we can count on that sturdy foundation. . . . Real curiosity not just danced with, but thoughtfully explored. I look forward to following the career of McFadzean as she claims her place between soil and sky."
--ARC Poetry Magazine

Author Bio

CASSIDY MCFADZEAN's poems have appeared in magazines across Canada, including The Malahat Review, Grain, Arc, Vallum, and The Fiddlehead. In 2012 she published a chapbook, Farwell, and in 2013 she was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. Her debut collection of poems, Hacker Packer (2015), was a finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Award's First Book Award, the City of Regina Award, and the League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Award. McFadzean was born in Regina and studied at the University of Regina and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.