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.
"“Cassidy McFadzean’s Drolleries evokes magic and vivid detail . . . Rarely does a poetry collection do such a cogent job of combining world-building and specifics. In Drolleries, McFadzean comes into her own as a metaphor maker. . . . A must-have for its technical skill and lyrical brevity."" --Quill & Quire “There’s a lushness in Drolleries, an opulence; even the shortest lyrical pieces are dense with detail. Sometimes the collection’s tone turns nearly documentary, illuminating minutiae with an art historian’s fervor. If McFadzean’s catalogues and descriptions occasionally veer toward the extravagant, it’s not due to a lack of self-control (the poems are, in fact, admirably precise and restrained). Rather, McFadzean seems to want to demonstrate the difficulty of packing the too-much-ness of it all—the feelings, the grief, the regret, the terrible beauty—into easily digestible pieces. The poems strain at their seams, larger than life, their beasts threatening escape. . . . a collection to read many times over.” —Canadian Notes and Queries"