The letter before A is silence. -- Juan Sweeney from the Translator's Note: Little is known about the life of Juan Sweeney de las Minas de Cobre. He grew up between Andalusia, Ireland, Oklahoma and Bolivia, lived centuries ago and has yet to be born. Vicente Huidobro wrote in a letter to Sweeney, “Reading these poems, one desires annihilation and love in equal measures. One tastes metal, as of an asteroid belt of old trains passing overhead.” Juan Sweeney preferred riding on the backs of trains to being seated inside; he loved cheese and whiskey and has often been compared to the troubadour poet, Cavalcanti, for his lifestyle of travel and intrigues with women of court. He inspired the characterization of Cervantes’ journeyman, Don Quixote, and paradoxically of Byron’s archetypical hero. I found these poems on shreds of paper in the walls of Sweeney Castle in Oklahoma, where I was born and where Sweeney de las Minas de Cobre presumably passed away, though his body soon disappeared from the family crypt.

Wolf's Milk: The Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney

Literature & Fiction

Sweeney, Chad

Poetry

H_NGM_N BOOKS

Forklift Books

Written during an autistic breakdown after his father’s sudden death, Sweeney’s visionary elegy for the living occupies the voice of the newly dead. Through shifting identities, genderless, omnigendered, bereft and haunted, this work affords an intimate mapping of grief―and a vision of what consciousness remains after the body.

Little Million Doors

Nightboat Books

In this surreal exposé of the human condition, Chad Sweeney transforms intangible space into a poetic playground. Poems unveil secret worlds, ecstatically reinventing archetypes for the American landscape. This book charismatically delights in the ordinary, grounding readers in urgency balanced by wonder.

Parable of Hide and Seek

Religion & Spirituality

Alice James Books

Poetry. "In AN ARCHITECTURE, Chad Sweeney reveals himself to be a Frank Gehry of language: making an overwhelming but coherent form in precise words that measure 'the violet gleam of girders,' where 'art is/the ghost between us.' The world swells with meaning before things 'smolder,' 'collapse,' 'drown.... And within the violent changes that he so precisely records, there are moments of rest and deep regard for what is passing. The poem is an elegy for the world in all its beauty and disturbing variety"--Maxine Chernoff. "Chad Sweeney's AN ARCHITECTURE, with its epigraph from Heraklitus (the philosopher of fiery flux), looks like a house that can't stand still, its 56 sections shape-shifting through spaces of meaning that are 'excavated / rather than built.' Among these magical passages, 'the nouns are verbs / the conduit between I and I.' Here, house and inhabitant (as form and content) perpetually exchange their positions, showing 'the snake / swallowing // peristalsis of / the world // by which these rooms // are constituted.' In Sweeney's swift architecture, memory assumes the power of imagination, and language becomes a platform for the mind's multiplicity: 'I speak, therefore I are.' Sweeney, as Vitruvius before him, makes architecture the sister-discipline of music"--Andrew Joron.

An Architecture

Arts & Photography

BlazeVOX Books

Poetry. "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.

Arranging The Blaze: Poems

Anhinga Press

White Martini of the Apocalypse

Marick Press

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Books by Sweeney, Chad