Chad Sweeney

Chad Sweeney is the author of three books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), andAn Architecture (BlazeVOX, 2007) and the chapbook A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer(Tarpaulin Sky, 2006) -- as well as the editor ofDays I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds: The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose (City Lights, 2009) and co-editor of the journal of poetry and translation, Parthenon West Review. Sweeney's work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2008, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Black Warrior,Barrow Street, Runes, Verse, Volt, Passages North, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. He is working toward a Ph.D. in literature at Western Michigan University, where he teaches poetry and serves as assistant editor of New Issues Press. He lives in Kalamazoo with his wife, the poet Jennifer K. Sweeney.

ARRANGING THE BLAZE
BY CHAD SWEENEY
$15.00. (email us for availability)

The poetry of Chad Sweeney is exuberant, imagistic, and prophetic. It locates a "critical moment" of the ineffable that would be inexpressible, had it not been so beautifully expressed: "the last hawk in the net of his eye." Prophetic means of the world -- "the median burns with oleander from Miami to LA" and "the beer tastes of uranium" -- but also touched by the marvelous ("the fire is folded inside its wood"). This is a poetry of awakening, of coming into knowledge. We are near the beginning and the end, but in a curiously real place where you can hear the white teeth of a bull pull at the grass. -- Paul Hoover

 The Navajo Poet
for Sherwin Bitsui 

He spoke from the back room of a storm 
where sky fires revolved around a ship's mast.

The Golden Fleece was a thing made of words, 
the wool a man grows 
to warm himself in the blue snow of desert mesa.

Nations disappeared

in search of this, 
crows belled from the eaves 
rang only 
for the guilty. Even their shadows

left fingerprints along our vertebrae.

Corner stores staggered to Route 66 
to thumb a ride 
from the ghosts of coyotes in gravel trucks.

Citizens pinched money between their eyelids. 
In the drying hands of butchers 
the bone saw rattled with bridges.

A shepherd sang from far away,
a lizard born of solar wind 
crept inside the well of a cactus to sleep.

Beggars founded their own city 
in the long median that burns with oleander 
from Miami to LA.

The beer tasted of uranium. Flint Wing 
auctioned the Milky Way's pelt 
for a dawn-streaked pontiac

with a full tank of gas.