The format of the four seasons is an established one in the arts, from Vivaldi’s violin concerto to Alphonse Mucha’s Art Nouveau artistic posters. Cassidy McFadzean’s latest poetry collection, Crying Dress, is another rendition of this archetype but with some additional features. The seasons in Crying Dress are as temporal as they are affective, just as “An elephant in the room / is something you can only feel.” Treating each as a kind of poetic spin on the ink blot test, I would write down the images and associations that came to mind after spending time with each individual section.

In winter, there is a sense of being unmoored. The winter section is full of bodies and architecture, frantic, jittery, or as McFadzean puts it: “It’s not the scurrying that wakes, / but the pounding on metal doors.” Spring preserves its sense of freshness as light and smell jump off the page. Nature, while present, is more of an entity that creeps into the imagination and wordplay, into a life dominated by urbanism, invoking a sense of itchy anticipation as the speaker was “out in the scary world / meeting people I had met before.” Summer brings a different state of agitation, perhaps unexpected, given its association with passion and energy captured in such phrases as “Hot Girl Summer.” McFadzean captures its frantic state through the kind of ekphrasis that captured my art historian heart in her previous collection, Drolleries. This time she writes of a “Giant mural of Apollo and Daphne: / pagan crime prevention scheme,” a visit to a museum shifting from wordplay to introspection. Instead of the familiar movement towards an end, fall is a moment of deepening, where roots sink firmly into the ground as if winter will be the next act rather than a reset, as exemplified by “Metaphysical Trust Issues” and “You Have Me Kiss the Dahlias.”

While the four sections of Crying Dress are distinct in how they capture a specific period of being, there is also narrative continuity across the collection. There are geographical markers to signal movement, whether formal—the Bridle Path, St. Alban’s Square, the Annex—or more intimate, as in “The Crown Was an End Stop,” where a single line captures the entirety of bizarreness that is Toronto: “A pigeon struck my head at Kipling / The train dry-heaves beside the platform.” However, McFadzean plays with these places in ways that make them blur without ever taking them for granted, her poems holding on to the wonder of a place and of living in this state. Similarly, there are glimpses into the speaker’s life that disrupt any expectations one might have as one progresses though Crying Dress, whether it is the mentions of children which fade as fast as they appear, or what sounds like a fight in “Energy Exchange” that ends with finding renewed harmony in shared activities, like cutting into rotting fruit.

McFadzean creates the sensation of time unravelling on an individual level as the speaker moves across geographical spaces and emotional states. The seasons are not a tether to any sort of grounding element so much as they are a form of checking in with the self, from more explicit forms of journaling to more melancholy moments of introspection. They are microcosms, seasons of the self that never stops growing, despite the weather.