Double Book Launch featuring Cassidy McFadzean & Kayla Czaga

Saint-Henri Books welcomes authors Cassidy McFadzean & Kayla Czaga in celebration of the publication of their latest poetry collections under House of Anansi Press. The evening will include a reading & signing by both authors, plus special guest, Yusuf Saadi.
Books by all three authors will be available for purchase the evening of the event.

Cassidy McFadzean, Crying Dress
The poems in 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.

Kayla Czaga, Midway
“I feel like the crud / I accidentally touch sometimes, whatever it is / that collects under cushions on my couch,” writes Kayla Czaga in her third collection, , an exploration of grief in all its manifestations. In her search for meaning in the aftermath of her parents’ deaths, Czaga visits the underworld (at least twice), Vietnamese restaurants, the beach, London’s Tate Modern, Las Vegas casinos, and a fish textbook. Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, these poems take the reader through bright scenery like carnival rides with fast climbs and sudden drops. The meanings and messages Czaga uncovers on her travels are complicated: hopeful, bleak—both comforting and not. Along with the parents the poet mourns, this collection showcases a varied cast. A suburban father-in-law copes with a troubling diagnosis. Marge Simpson quits The Simpsons. Death is a metalhead who dates girls too young for him. Midway is a welcome and necessary collection from one of the most celebrated and accomplished poets of her generation.

About House of Anansi:
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 by writers Dennis Lee and David Godfrey to publish work by Canadian writers.

Anansi owes its name to the West-African spider god Kwaku Anansi, one of the world’s greatest folk heroes. Godfrey, who taught in Ghana in his twenties, admired the wise but mischievous prankster who created the world. The two named their publishing venture House of Anansi Press, both as a nod to the small-but-mighty spider god, and a poke at a certain other publishing “House.”
Read more aobout House of Anansi here.

Host or Publisher Librairie St-Henri Books