Advertisement
Westminster Bookmark is pleased to team up with Invisible Publishing, UNB English, and the League of Canadian Poets to host award-winning poet and fiction writer Cassidy McFadzean.The event, in celebration of McFadzean's new books Dead Writers (fiction, collaborative) and Crying Dress (poetry), takes place here in the shop (88 York St.) at 6pm on Tuesday, February 25th, and will feature readings from Cassidy and local authors Rebecca Salazar and Yogesh Tak.
About DEAD WRITERS: In this collaborative omnibus-style fiction project, four writers navigate the protean concept of the "bargain" in novella-length stories. The lives of a biographer surveying the career of a "haunted" literary figure, a lovelorn journalist entering into a diabolic covenant, a tourist attempting to stay sober through her holiday travels, and a doctor's complicity in a colonial scandal, stand side to side within this macro-narrative of interlocking themes.
These horror-inflected offerings of existential dread, tainted pasts, and uncertain futures serve as an unbalancing reminder that there is always a high price to pay for the corruption of the soul.
About CRYING DRESS: 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.
CASSIDY MCFADZEAN is the author of three books of poetry: Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024), Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart, 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer (M&S, 2015), winner of two Saskatchewan Book Awards and finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and Dead Writers (Invisible Publishing, 2025).
REBECCA SALAZAR (she/they) is a queer, disabled, and racialized Latinx writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. Their first full-length collection, sulphurtongue (McClelland & Stewart) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the New Brunswick Book Awards, the Atlantic Book Awards, and the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Their second collection, antibody, will be released this March with McClelland & Stewart.
YOGESH TAK is an MA English Student at UNB.
Advertisement
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
88 York St, Fredericton, NB E3B 3N5, Canada
