Crying Dress: Poems

By Cassidy McFadzean

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781487012595

Cassidy McFadzean

CASSIDY McFADZEAN studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and fiction at Brooklyn College. She is the author of two books of poetry: Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer (M&S 2015), which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her crown of sonnets, Third State of Being, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2022. She lives in Toronto.

Book preview

Crying Dress, Poems, by Cassidy McFadzean. The cover features a sketched illustration of a figure composed of different shapes on textured a beige background. The torso of the figure is a green sphere, the toe is a black point, the right arm a brown bat, the left arm a bell, and the face a combination of a white triangle and red half-circle. The figure has small lips as if it is wearing simple lipstick.

crying

dress

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Cassidy McFadzean

Logo: House of Anansi Press

Copyright © 2024 Cassidy McFadzean

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Published in Canada in 2024 and the

USA

in 2024 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

houseofanansi.com

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (

GCA

by Benetech) publisher.

The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to readers with print disabilities.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Crying dress : poems / Cassidy McFadzean.

Names: McFadzean, Cassidy, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230505597 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230505600 |

ISBN 9781487012588 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487012595 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS8625.F35 C79 2024 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

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Cover design: Greg Tabor

Cover image: Costume design for the Triadic Ballet, 1919.

Found in the Collection of Bauhaus-Museum Weimar.

Book design and typesetting: Lucia Kim

Ebook design: Nicole Lambe

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House of Anansi Press is grateful for the privilege to work on and create from the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee, as well as the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

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Logos: Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Canadian Government

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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts,

the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

for Kourosh

winter

CHAMBER MUSIC

Ringing in the year with brutalism and velour

Accidental accentual outfits

Show me a building with no facing

The sparrow begging for crumbs

rests inside the hollow of your chest

What does it mean to be vulnerable?

I don’t disguise my raw materials

Sadness is present   Desire is present

Oversharing our worst selves

A ringing in the ears

I could live pressed against your body

like a bird or polished stone

Brutal in the same basic ways

GO SIT IN THE WHITE HOT

Before bed, I count teeth slipping out,

calculate bodies in the high-rise above

As a child, who comforted you

when you stirred from sleep?

Did you stand in the doorway,

watching softly snoring faces,

too terrified to step