Cassidy McFadzean

“My desk in Toronto last September, much neater than usual.”

Readings

A book of poetry from the past five years

Matsuki Masutani, I Will Be More Myself in the Next World (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2021).

I learned about Masutani’s poetry in an interview he did with poet Rob Taylor. Masutani’s debut book reads like a memoir-in-poems, touching on his years of marriage, life on Denman Island, cancer treatment followed by a Parkinson’s diagnosis, and closing with anecdotes of his grandchildren. I love the simplicity of his lines, which feel crystalline, capturing quarrels and frustrations of daily life, as well as moments of sweetness, observation, and wonder. Most striking is Masutani’s examination of past decisions such as moving from Japan to Vancouver in 1976: “Sometimes I imagine / there’s still an empty seat / at the table / waiting for me / after forty years.” This is a book wherein dreams and waking life are treated as equally tangible, and the boundaries between life and death are blurred as in the memorable title, I will be more myself in the next world. Masutani’s work is of particular interest to my recent poems, many of which feature pared-down language and short, meditative lines.

A book of poetry from the past ten years

Emily Skillings, Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017)

The Song Cave is one of my favourite publishers, and in recent years they’ve released phenomenal books by John Keene, Sara Nicholson, and Emily Skillings’ standout debut Fort Not. This is a book that revels in anaphora and list-making, creating a poetics of repetition which, through the accumulation of images, defamiliarizes us from words and language itself. Poems like “One Hundred and Fifteen Palaces” show us the possibilities of all the worlds a poem can build, while the title poem “Fort Not” is phrased as a set of imperatives: “Don’t send money / Don’t send thoughts / Don’t send flowers to die on my table.” Skillings knows how to create a pattern—and when to break it, something I’ve been thinking about in my own work. I can’t wait for her follow-up Tantrums in Air, which The Song Cave is releasing later in 2025.

A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how has that shifted or remained constant for you over time

Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)

I remember a professor at Iowa warning me against reading too much Lucie Brock-Broido, that the baroque exuberance of her poems might send me even further towards the esoteric and obscure. But what I think of most when I read poems like “A Girl Ago,” is Brock-Broido’s capacity to create a texture of a certain feeling of being alive: “I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost / And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia.” Brock-Broido’s poems feel simultaneously outside of time and rooted in it, as in her elegy for her father: “Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him. / With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.” The intricacy of Brock-Broido’s lines and her singular vision has protected me from direct imitation, but I see echoes of her title “Extreme Wisteria” in one of my poems from Crying Dress, “Deranged Hydrangea.” Years after first encountering it, the title “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World,” and its final line often echo in my mind: “We have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape Suit.”

A book of poetry that was important to you at a specific moment in your life

Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf, 2007)

After the sudden death of my mother in 2020, I turned to poetry for consolation and to help make sense of what felt incomprehensible. Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy, which traces the first year after her adult son’s death, describes the visceral pain following the unexpected death of a loved one. In “Tragedy,” Bang speaks to the disbelief of the early days of raw grief: “It begins to sink in. Dead / Is dead. Not just not. / Here.” I found understanding in Bang’s poems, which capture the isolation and claustrophobia of grief, and also examine the elegiac form itself: “The role of elegy is / To put a death mask on tragedy, / A drape on the mirror.” Elegy is a book I’m revisiting alongside Denise Riley’s Say Something Back, Betsy Warland’s Bloodroot, Brenda Hillman’s Death Tractates, and Andrea Actis’ Grey All Over, among others as I work on a manuscript about my mother’s death.

A poet or book in translation or in another language

Etel Adnan, Time. Translated by Sarah Riggs (Nightboat, 2019)

I first encountered the work of American-Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan when Time won the International Griffin Prize in 2020. The book is translated from French by Sarah Riggs, and unlike Adnan’s other books on my shelf, which are written in prose stanzas, the six poem sequences that make up Time are lineated in short stanzas, envisioned as postcards to poet Khaled Najar, the first of which she received in October of 2003: “my friend Khaled sends me palm tree / postcards because he knows that / Europe is covered in burned petrol.” Adnan’s work is both philosophical and grounded in the historical, especially in reckoning with Israel’s repeated invasions of Beirut. Adnan died in 2021, but poems like “The Arab Apocalypse,” “Jenin,” and “It was Beirut, All Over Again” gained renewed readership during Israel’s most recent bombing of Beirut and genocide in Palestine. Adnan’s work offers a poetics of witness that stands against hopelessness and despair: “let’s not bother to fear those / who insult our insubordination / the conquered will always have the / last word.”

Writings

Somewhere in those days unending

I was curled on the couch in boredom

while you moved around the house.

You always went to bed before me,

coming downstairs after your bath

locking the doors, closing the shades

feeding the pets, reminding us

to fill and start the dishwasher.

We begin and end each day in water.

When you let down your hair

its strands were like waves,

and you were a young woman again.

Every time you rest your hand

on the hair at the back of my head

I know you’re there.

A tingling sensation spreads

throughout my body.

You visit when I’m alone

late at night and the border

between our worlds is thinner.

A gossamer veil hangs

between us, and your hand

presses against its membrane.

In the months before your death

I was afraid to be alone,

now I bask in this shiver.

I want to feel your presence,

I want to feel you here with me.

Ghost flower

A single flower at the end of each stalk

thick and waxy, each translucent

stem downward turning,

as if weighed down by its crown.

The ghost plant it fleeting, appears

in the forest just one week a year,

for the rest, it remains underground,

unable to produce its own chlorophyll.

Saprophyte, it feeds on decaying matter,

fungi and dead leaves. I first found

them in the forest at Blanket as a girl,

not knowing their purpose, drawn

to their pale colour, petals flecked

with black and sometimes glowstick pink.

I longed to lift them from the dirt

and dig. One summer I did,

the flowers not keeping their shape.

Their flesh blackened and

turned brittle. I didn’t find them

again, not until I was grown.

Not until you were gone

and Credence pointed them out

on the forest floor,

far from where I last saw

you, lost you, left

you there.

Cassidy McFadzean lives in Toronto. She studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and fiction at Brooklyn College. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024). Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and Dead Writers (Invisible Publishing, 2025).