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"Crying Dress, acclaimed poet Cassidy McFadzean's third book, is a collection of poetry exploring the multiplicity of meaning that arises from fragmentation, rhythm, competing sounds, and ellipsis. Rooted in the tradition of lyric poetry, these strikingly original poems revel in musicality (rhyme, beat, and alliteration) while deploying puns, idioms, and other forms of linguistic play to create a dissonance that challenges the expected narrative coherence of a poem. From the ghosts and gardens of Brooklyn and Sicily to the clanging of garbage chutes in Uno Prii's modernist high rises in Toronto, to quiet moments of intimacy in domestic spaces, and the early days of sobriety and grief, Crying Dress explores the intersections between noise and coherence, the conversational and the associative, the architectural and the ecological. These poems tease out moments of connection from inside the communicative failures of capitalist systems, while featuring the poet's sonic, vertiginous lyricism and gift for overlooked detail."--
About the author
CASSIDY McFADZEAN is the author of three books of poetry, most recently
Crying Dress (House of Anansi 2024). Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in
Joyland,
The Walrus, and
Hazlitt, and in
Dead Writers, a collaborative anthology out this fall with Invisible Publishing. Cassidy was born in Regina and currently lives in Toronto, where she is the 2024-2025 Writer in Residence at Sheridan College.
Summary
The poems in Crying Dress, acclaimed poet Cassidy McFadzean’s third collection, explore the multiplicity of meaning that arises from fragmentation, rhythm, competing sounds, and ellipsis. Rooted in the tradition of lyric poetry, these strikingly original poems revel in musicality (rhyme, beat, and alliteration) while deploying puns, idiom, and other forms of linguistic play to create a dissonance that challenges the expected coherence of a poem. From the ghosts and gardens of Brooklyn and Sicily to the clanging of garbage chutes in Uno Prii’s modernist high rises in Toronto, to quiet moments of intimacy in domestic spaces, and the early days of sobriety and grief, Crying Dress explores the intersections between noise and coherence, the conversational and the associative, the architectural and the ecological, while reaffirming the poet’s sonic, vertiginous lyricism and gift for overlooked detail.
