Crying DressText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI said you could trace thought processeslike a series of intersecting bridgesimagining each fragment opening up the textYou called it Piranesian Corridors leading back to the point of originteasing a web with a not at its centerLater I unwrapped a dress your sister told you to gift me when you were certain you loved meMy crying dress Its ribbons of blue, red, greenYou called it Triadic Oskar’s balletSpoken word as directives Love as actionThe movement of a body in space geometricElephant ToothText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedYou brought tulips because when they droop they droop elegantlyThe dentist said the rootcurled in my gums delicatelyThe year all our bad luckcoalesced like cloudberries rising from their stalksIn a world you no longer inhabitI listen to a voice inside myselfSinging a song at a lower decibelSinging its quieter song
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© 2024 Excerpt from
Crying Dress by Cassidy McFadzean published with permission of House if Anansi Press.Cassidy McFadzean is the author of three books of poetry:
Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024),
Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and
Hacker Packer (M&S 2015), winner of two Saskatchewan Book Awards and a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her fiction has appeared in
Joyland,
Maisonneuve, and
EVENT, and is forthcoming in
Dead Writers (Invisible Publishing, 2024)
. Her chapbook,
Third State of Being (Gaspereau Press, 2022), was a finalist for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Cassidy was born in Regina and currently lives in Toronto.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Crying Dress
by Cassidy McFadenHouse of Anansi Press, 2024
Publisher’s Description
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.
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