Drolleries — Cassidy McFadzean (McClelland & Stewart)

Today's book of poetry:
Drolleries.  Cassidy McFadzean.  McClelland & Stewart.  Toronto, Ontario. 2019.

Today's book of poetry had the pleasure of reading Cassidy McFadzean's first collection, Hacker Packer (McClelland & Stewart, 2015), so we were ready for this, but not quite.  We're pretty certain that writing like this isn't something new for McFadzean but it is exciting and new for us.

This voice hits above and below the belt.  With crisp jabs and hooks you never see coming.  Drolleries muses fantastic on slivers and witch hazel, pine needles and shower mould, the last El Greco and the real Madrid.  

It doesn't really matter what Cassidy McFadzean is writing about, it is how.  Everything she touches becomes immediately fascinating because the reader has early confidence that McFadzean is going to put on curve on the outcome worth watching.

Mood

Witch hazel in my pussy.

Rose water on the brain.

Let's not go down memory lane,

but memory locker, feelings stored away.

I keep my garbage in the freezer

just like the city taught me.

I know it's love, when during sex

my new lover wipes my ass for me.

Zip up your feelings, Will advised

looking over the Brooklyn Bridge.

I watch a man zip his pet rat

into his jacket on the subway.

Have I ruined another group chat?

Have I repressed a painful memory?

I say goodbye with vocal fry

so I can feel it in my body.

📖📖📖

It will take much better read people than Today's book of poetry can afford to hire to understand all of McFadzean's references to Anna Karenina, Nastagio degli Onesti, the air Homer breathed or what a Zora bag is.  But it doesn't matter, Today's book of poetry was enthralled, invested, excited and fulfilled by what McFadzean was cooking.

Our offices are a little empty these days as family commitments have reduced our ranks.  Today's book of poetry is sending all the appropriate prayers.  Family is everything.  But those of us here are riding with McFadzean.

It is somewhat like being in a fast car inside a fascinating museum, and all of that in a dream.  Take that.  Drolleries surprised and genuinely delights every time you turn a page.  Cassidy McFadzean is so clever smart it is inspiring.  Today's book of poetry will show this poetry to everyone, say "here, read this!"

Fortune

Previews for movies we've already seen comfort

like digging for a stone I know by feel,

engraved with my fortune, hand-picked.

In the night, ice cracks in the AC, waking us.

I turn the dial and hear women yelling

in the street, then a car turning into the alley.

In morning fatigue, my vision settles

on the veins of a woman bagging our groceries

at Bulk Barn. A bulging star, she brandishes

something other-worldly implanted in her.

We want to be stranger than what we are.

I pay what we owe and enter the idling car.

📖📖📖

Today's reading at the Today's book of poetry offices was late, interrupted, hurried and ultimately not worthy of Cassidy McFadzean's fine Drolleries.  We will take another crack at it tomorrow morning.  By then we should have a few more oars in the water and be getting up to speed.

Today's book of poetry continues to consider some changes in our format.  We would be most appreciative and curious to hear what you, our readers, would like to see more of, less of, or something new altogether?

You regular readers know how much Today's book of poetry loves a list poem.  Here.

Last Walk

Tired of wandering the same prairie

roads outside the city, tired of parking

on the same patch of flattened grass

beside the trail marker. Tired of climbing

over the barbed wire, tired of waiting

for trucks to pass before crossing the dirt

highway. Tired of brushing ticks off

the fabric of tucked socks, plucking not-yet

swollen abdomens. Tired of descending

into the branches. Tired of finding a way.

Tired of feeling limbs snap back as I follow

you toward a path, tired of reading the map.

Tired of squishing purple berries between

index finger and thumb, tired of feeling

numb. Tired of swatting flies, tired of saying

I'm thirsty, asking for a drink of water

from the bottle that you carry. Tired of deciding

how much farther to go. Tired of taking

the same tired photo, tired of rusted tractors

parked in a more or less straight line,

tired of being tied to the grid superimposed

on the terrain, tired of crouching beside

a hole in the ground waiting for a glimpse

of something alive before turning away.

📖📖📖

A list poem of a sort.  This one was a real smasher.

Books like Drolleries don't come along that often in poetry world.  As clever, intelligent and informed as McFadzean obviously is, these poems never intimidate, even this shaky reader.  McFadzean carries a big stick, but softly.

All hands on deck gave Drolleries the Today's book of poetry office standing ovation.  First class marks.  Today's book of poetry thought these confessions and celebrations merited wine in the kitchen.

Photo:  Sarah Bodri

Cassidy McFadzean

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CASSIDY McFADZEAN was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2015, she published Hacker Packer, which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in magazines across Canada and the U.S., including BOAAT, Prelude, The Fiddlehead, PRISM international, and Arc, and have been finalists for the CBC Literary Awards, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and the Canadian Authors Association’s Emerging Writer Award. Her work has been anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry 2016, The New Wascana Anthology, and In Fine Form 2. She lives in Toronto.

BLURBS

“McFadzean’s debut collection is a finely layered exploration of language and archetype rooted in mythology, history, intimate reflections, and more external ghosts. 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

“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

Reads from Hacker Packer

Video: The Leader-Post

penguinrandomhouse.ca 

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Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

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