Wri tten during an autistic breakdown after his father’s sudden death, Chad 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 remains of consciousness after the body dies.
An excerpt from the book can be found here.
Reviews
Like a hurricane of images, or a tsunami of grief, Sweeney’s lines strain against a background of stability and coherence that barely holds together. The book is an elegy not only because the title tells us so, but because it performs its elegiac ritual without the filter of conventional form or syntactical coherence. If grief is inchoate, the poet asks, what language is sufficient to the duty it is called upon to perform? The answer is a language suddenly released from its duties to inform or to persuade—functions of containment, framing, and interpretation—a non-syntax left to its singular capacity to conjure the ineffable, to bring it into being.
The feelings that inhabited me were truly heartbreaking, beautiful, passionately sorrowful and joyful at the same time. I continued to trace the voice through the coming weeks until it entirely ceased. I thought it might be my father speaking, yet oddly enough, this feeling of “ghost” serves equally to trace or to express my sense of dislocation, joy/terror, disconnection as an autistic person in the world.
Typical Writing Day: Chad Sweeney
“Southern California poet, translator and editor Chad Sweeney’s sixth full-length poetry title LITTLE MILLION DOORS: AN ELEGY, a book-length lyric poem stripped down to the bone. LITTLE MILLION DOORS: AN ELEGY surrounds the death of the author’s father, and what follows, utilizing the process of grief and writing as a way to potentially rebuild. The effect of Sweeney’s lines are striking, composing phrases that end before they finish, accumulating as a kind of staccato or lyric pointillism, one made out of moments to cohere into something larger, but only once enough of the poem has presented itself. As the book/poem writes, mid-volume: “What is it to live / Is to want to live [.]”
Written after the death of the poet’s father and during an autistic episode, poet and translator Sweeney (Arranging the Blaze) masters the art of understatement in this book of forthright and delicate poems. Spare couplets carry untitled, unpunctuated poems full of probing questions: “the body// A lantern how/ To say it// It it,” and “What is it to live/ Is to want to live,” as well as moments of synesthetic experience: “House in a/ Street of houses my/ Hands in the trees for bells.” Grief is the ostensible subject throughout, offering a searching elegy: “for years I could not// Answer a music in pain the undying// Will undying in the dying grass.” But sorrow gives way to other emotions: “I’ve tried to hold/ to anger a snow// Delineates the thin/ Winter// Branches.” Emily Dickinson’s influence is palpable throughout this meditative book. Yet the speaker recognizes that affective attunement and scrupulous observation will carry us only so far: “But I am a tree of no branches/ Tree of no tree,” and elsewhere, “I am looking but there is no/ Me to do the looking.” What knowledge we gain, the poet hazards, might be found through absence and negation.
In an Internet-based world, thankfully, there is still poet-to-poet news. We read a book so good we have to tell somebody. We phone another poet and read poems aloud until both of us are moved to silence. Then the work begins to spread in the old way, an excitement, a brush fire. This is what I hope will happen to Chad Sweeney’s Little Million Doors: An Elegy (Nightboat Books).
The poems, which read like one long poem, are an elegy to Sweeney’s father, yet the speaker’s identity is fluid, and finding who and what turns out not to be the destination.
Lines composed by a disjoint of conscious memory, shards of grief felt in the liminal spaces of shock and disorientation. Stark and spare lines fuse, then undo themselves by reversal. The poem emerges, the stance of stanzas comes with no duality by form or content.
