Arranging the Blaze

Book excerpt: 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.