Little Million Doors

"Still and spare, Little Million Doors is a book-length series of lyrics that mourns a lost father. These half-uttered poems prove the “possibility” of poetry to provide avenues to understanding, even amid grief, by constructing themselves loosely enough to allow both time and space to quiver within. This level of quantum energy may feel nearly ungovernable but Chad Sweeney makes it work through internal music, the most specific of images and events, and a fine-tuned and innovative grammar that loops and fractures and overlaps and reforms. Perhaps ghostly but never disembodied, these lyrics feel immediate, necessary and absolutely brand new. Though elegiac they are ever hopeful and affirming and alive."—Kazim Ali, Judge’s Citation "Chad Sweeney’s book Little Million Doors enacts the starkness of Barthes’ Mourning Diary but with the potency of the long poem, a meditation on the 'living shadow on the wall.' This moving work considers how the body finds solace in the world-building of elegy. This book is also an extended meditation on elegy as subjectivity. Little Million Doors is an original."—Carmen Gimenez Smith "How long do we walk between our deaths and that next plane? In Little Million Doors time settles around the dead as though snow in a meadow. As though the meadow itself falling as one long day assembles with the dead at its center no matter the direction they walk. In Sweeney’s book-length elegy, both ephemeral and on-the-tongue, populous and lonely, the road was all / Of bones