Hacker Packer

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.

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.