Hacker Packer

by Cassidy McFadzean

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780771057236
Publisher:	McClelland & Stewart
Publication date:	04/14/2015
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

The Night Before a Red-Eye Flight 1

Stag Hunt Mosaic 2

I Smile Earwide 4

The Boundary Stone of the Agora 5

Thermal Shock, Dolní Vestonice 6

You Be the Skipper, I'll Be the Sea 7

Rodin's Muses Surround Him 8

On Wearing the Leggings of Earthly Delights 10

The Ship Shall Be Nailed, the Shield Bound 12

With the Temple of Jupiter Below Us 13

Large Leaf Verdure with Animals and Birds 15

The Bone Chapel 16

Trypophobia, or Third Mile, Appian Way 18

Battledore 20

As She Talks, Her Lips Breathe Spring Roses 21

The Charioteer 23

His Arms Primed 24

On Naming and the Origin of Pity 25

Soloist 27

Fledging 29

Born of Lycia, Light of the Sun 31

On Defeat in the Siegesallee 32

Forgotten Film Stars, Berlin ca. 1912 34

Avenue of the Saints 35

Leave Her and She Swells 36

The Unicorn Recognizes Itself in the Mirror 37

Cameo 39

The Blue of a Rock Greenling Fish 41

Drupe 42

A Skin for a Skin 44

Arrhythmia 45

Habits 47

Conclave 48

Beneath a Golden Altar 49

Corvus and Oscine 50

Discovery 51

Pan and the Shepherds 53

Underworld 54

Gnomic 55

The Holy Door, Opened and Closed 56

Whale Watching 57

The Mountaineer 58

Loup Garou 60

Born of a Wolf 61

Triptych with Doctrine of Signatures 62

Cuttlefish 65

Lullaby for Cleaving 66

Remedy 68

I'll Meet You at the Orangerie 70

The Living Skies Struck Us Dead 71

To Bear All Toil and Wake the Clear Nights Through 72

Boomwortels and Other Roots 76

Notes 79

Acknowledgements 81

Editorial 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 O’Meara, 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 McFadzean’s 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 it’s Agamemnon’s 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

"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. . . . 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."
—Publishers Weekly

"To read Cassidy McFadzean’s 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 McFadzean’s, 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 McFadzean’s 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

From the Publisher