Tainted by the Same Counterfeit

Candice Louisa Daquin's collection is a mis-en-scene of beautiful dysfunction, erotic melancholy and an immigrant's dystopia. As a lesbian ageing in-sight, Daquin's wry observations of life are at times, piercing, painful and intensely telling a to human-nature and our endless foibles. Her occupations as writer, psychotherapist and activist, play against a myriad of backdrops from Southern France, Egypt and the wastelands of America. Daquin's co-editing work on two award-winning anthologies lends her the gravitas to produce a fine book of revelations about who we really are and why we're so often tainted by the same counterfeit.

About the Author :
Candice Louisa Daquin is of Sephardi French/Egyptian descent. Born in Europe, Daquin worked in publishing for The U.S., Embassy / Chamber of Commerce before immigrating to the American Southwest to study and become a Psychotherapist, where she has continued writing and editing whilst practicing as a therapist. Daquin has worked at Jewish Community Centers and Rape Crisis Centers both in Texas and Ontario, Canada. Her area of specialization is adults sexually abused as children. Prior to publishing her own poetry collections, Daquin regularly wrote for the poetry periodicals: Rattle and The Northern Poetry Review. Daquin is Senior Editor at Indie Blu(e) Publishing, a feminist micro-press. Writer-in-Residence for Borderless Journal. Editor of Poetry & Art for The Pine Cone Review. Editor, for Blackbird Press. Daquin's poetic work takes its form from the confessional women poets of the 19th and 20th century as well as queer authors writing from the 1950's onward. Her career(s) teaching critical thinking and practicing as a psychotherapist, have heavily influenced her work, with explored key themes including; sexual-abuse, parental-relationships, mental illness and queer-identity. Daquin's work is also significantly imprinted by Audre Lorde, Françoise Sagan, Angela Carter, activist Egyptian physician Nawal El Saadawi, Navdanya seed bank creator/campaigner Vandana Shiva, Pablo Neruda, Israeli PM Golda Mier, Toni Morrison and feminist philosophers bell hooks, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray.As a queer woman of mixed ethnicity and passionate feminist beliefs concerning equality, Daquin's poetry is her body of evidence.

Review :
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