Hacker Packer

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 of Greece and Rome to the museums of Europe, from the barracks of Auschwitz to the streets of North Central Regina, the inner-city neighbourhood where the poet grew up, the poems in Cassidy McFadzean's dazzling 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 roadkilled 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.