Cassidy McFadzean | Issue 36
Poetry | said you could trace thought processes / like a series of intersecting bridges / imagining each fragment opening up the text
Crying Dress
I said you could trace thought processes like a series of intersecting bridges imagining each fragment opening up the text You called it Piranesian Corridors leading back to the point of origin teasing a web with a not at its center Later I unwrapped a dress your sister told you to gift me when you were certain you loved me My crying dress Its ribbons of blue, red, green You called it Triadic Oskar’s ballet Spoken word as directives Love as action The movement of a body in space geometric
Elephant Tooth
You brought tulips because when they droop they droop elegantly The dentist said the root curled in my gums delicately The year all our bad luck coalesced like cloudberries rising from their stalks In a world you no longer inhabit I listen to a voice inside myself Singing a song at a lower decibel Singing its quieter song  
© 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.
Crying Dress by Cassidy McFaden House of Anansi Press, 2024
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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