Candice Louisa Daquin is of Sephardi French/Egyptian descent. Born in Europe, Daquin worked in publishing for the US Embassy before immigrating to America to become a Psychotherapist, where she has continued writing and editing whilst practicing as a therapist. She began working with Indie Blu(e) upon inception and is a Senior Editor in the company.
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 wrote for the poetry periodical Rattle and The Northern Poetry Review. Daquin freelances as Writer-in-Residence for Borderless Journal and Poetry & Art Editor for The Pine Cone Review. Daquin created Indie Blu(e)’s best-selling award-winning anthology: SMITTEN This Is What Love Looks Like: Poetry by Women for Women. SMITTEN won Finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards.
Daquin’s poetic work takes its form from the confessional women poets of the 19th and 20th century and lesbian authors. Her career(s) teaching critical thinking and practicing as a psychotherapist have heavily influenced her work, with explored key themes including, sexual-abuse, 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 passionate feminist beliefs concerning equality, Daquin’s poetry and prose is her body of evidence.
Published collections:
A jar for the jarring (STG Press)
Pinch the lock (Finishing Line Press)
Tainted by the same Counterfeit (coming out September 2022, Finishing Line Press)
Self Published chapbooks: The bright day is gone child and you are in for the dark, Illusions of Existing, Sit in Fever.
Candice Louisa Daquin’s first book of poetry began her journey into the psyche and transformation of women from girl to adulthood. Her revelations about this process, through pain, healing, insight, love and loss, are both truths and metaphors many can relate to and have been expressed in the beautiful language of a poet, to illustrate our shared experience of life, both humorous, frightening, puzzling and tragic, but ultimately redemptive through the power of love. A jar for the jarring is the first in a series of seven books examining what it is to exist and experience life. This is the Second Edition.
Available on Amazon.com
“Poet Candice Daquin uses carefully culled words to take her readers from the comfort of their couch to the bruised and bleeding psyche of the wounded heart. Her nomadic early years, sheltered by deep-thinking and creative European grandparents, set her on a course of discovery, creativity, and artistry. She has a special understanding of and connection with the disenfranchised, the abused, the castaways of society. Quite possibly her extensive work in Psychotherapy honed her laser focus on what lies beneath the surface of things, the surface of people, the surface of behavior. A background in dance informs the graceful flow, the cadence of her language.” Linda. Paul, Author, Editor.
Available on Amazon.com
Fighting back from a serious illness in 2017, Candice Louisa Daquin refused to diminish her passion for writing and editing poetry despite only partial recovery. This is her first compilation since; a foray through darkness and light. Tainted by the Same Counterfeit speaks to human nature, our foibles and immense strength. The hope we find in each other, even as we are wounded. How necessary being real is, in an increasingly artificial space.
“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, 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, My Mother’s Ghost Scrubs the Floor at 2 a.m.
Tainted by the same Counterfeit will be available for pre-order May 2022 and worldwide sale September 2022.
Indie Blu(e) Publishing 