CASSIDY MCFADZEAN's poems have appeared in magazines across Canada, including The Malahat Review, Grain, Arc, Vallum, and The Fiddlehead. In 2012 she published a chapbook, Farwell, and in 2013 she was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. Her debut collection of poems, Hacker Packer (2015), was a finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Award's First Book Award, the City of Regina Award, and the League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Award. McFadzean was born in Regina and studied at the University of Regina and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Artful as the mosaics, tapestries, and temples that are its subject matter, Hacker Packer is a vitrine of rich, striking contrasts and images arranged for the fortunate reader. In poem after poem of sure-footed lines, Cassidy McFadzean proves herself to be a gifted curator of the varied and temporal. An outstanding debut. --David O'Meara, author of Noble Gas, Penny Black 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