With settings ranging from the ancient sites and lavish museums of Europe to the inner-city neighbourhood in North Central Regina where the poet grew up, the poems in Cassidy McFadzean's startling first collection embrace myth and metaphysics and explore the contradictory human impulses to create art and enact cruelty.

A child burn victim is conscripted into a Grade Eight fire safety seminar; various road-killed animals make their cases for sainthood; and the fantastical visions in Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights move off the canvas and onto the speaker's splendid pair of leggings. Precociously wise, formally dexterous, and unrepentantly strange, the poems in Hacker Packer present a wholly memorable poetic debut.