Tainted by the Same Counterfeit by Candice Louisa Daquin

Candice Louisa Daquin’s passionately transcendent collection of poems Tainted by the same counterfeit is a sorcery of language, rich with tight and visceral imagery, filled with summoning and spells, longing and lust, and poems that cut to the bone only to reveal roses blooming from the wounds. It moves through love and geography, through pain and freedom, and reads with a prosody that echoes the Shakespearian in its beauty. This book is the temple and the monk, the blood and the spirit, divine feminine wisdom and the roots of earth’s darkness— “the color of aubergine and hibiscus bled in winter river as redwood is lost to time.” I am forever tainted by the impressions these poems have pressed upon my psyche.

–Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan

Candice Daquin‘s poetry provides an exquisite blend of the delicate and powerful, of profound emotion established in simplicity, of eloquence and terror and wisdom born of experience and self-examination. These nuanced and graceful pieces yield insight into the vulnerability of contemporary women; they give us glimpses into grief and longing and the various “forms of starvation and war” so deeply imbedded in our culture. This is an authentic book — a poignant and intense artifact of our times — and one to be treasured.

–Robert Okaji, author of My Mother’s Ghost Scrubs the Floor at 2 a.m.

Tainted by the Same Counterfeit is “spectacle and singularity” that swims, dreamlike, through the subconscious, hinting at baryonic matter that disintegrates like a surrealist portrait made of words.  The issues of identity and origins, the seeming reality of flesh and fabric, old letters and dog collars, swirls like sea foam on a wintry beach, ultimately leaving nothing but subatomic particles neither from here nor from there, yet rooted , rooted deeply, in loss.

–Donna Snyder, author & Director of the Tumblewords Project

“Tainted by the same counterfeit” is an incredible compilation of raw, vulnerable, palpable poetry from an incomparable writer, well before her time. It is magnetic and pulled me in from start to finish. The words found in these pages will live on in one’s mind for years to come; they have lasting power.

–Tremaine Loadholt, Author & Editor, Medium.