Click here to Purchase: Nightboat Books 

​“Sweeney masters the art of understatement in this book of forthright and delicate poems.”         —Publisher's Weekly

"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

"Little Million Doors enacts the starkness of Barthes’ Mourning Diary but with the potency of the long poem . . . This  moving work considers how the body finds solace in the world-building of elegy . . . Little Million Doors is an original."      —Carmen Gimenez Smith

“Meaning becomes, if not fluid, something that shimmers, concurrently in multiple, and even contradictory directions. There is something radiant that emerges from his lines . . .”      —Rob McLennan’s Blog

"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. Speaker becomes ghost and readers trace a dead man's steps, taking leave of the cities and low heavens, each other as children . . . How many doors are there through which we can walk out of this world?"    
                                                                                                —Danielle Pafunda

Click here to purchase: Alice James Books

“Chad Sweeney’s poems are matryoshka dolls of imagination: strangeness inside longing inside charm. Relentlessly figurative, they read as dreamscapes and translations: if the human soul has peripheral vision, these poems are what it sees. --Bob Hicok

“Chad Sweeney’s Parable of Hide and Seek reads like the experience of stepping into someone else’s bizarre but magnificently imaginative dreamworld. . . a mesmerizing read that takes the unexpected to a new and unchartered level.” --New Pages

"Sweeney creates a liminal space where the real work of poetry begins ... this is a book of manifold pleasures written by a poet with a deft, assured hand.”  --Coldfront Magazine, included in “Top 30 Poetry Books of 2010”

“[M]usic divides night from day in this remarkable collection of sonically rich and imagistically arresting poems. Page after page, I found myself making little gasping sounds in response to Sweeney’s deft exercises in the field of negative space.”  --Rattle

The poems in Chad Sweeney’s new book view the world through strangely faceted eyes . . . and as such they display a dazzling Rumiesque ecstasy, one that holds the reader as rapt as the creator of these poems is held by Creation. [Sweeney] is a shaman presiding over—of all things—the wedding of simplicity and sophistication.” --Mary Ruefle

“These poems turn the world inside out. Full-throttle forest! Astronaut winging! Whose shadow is that with a heartbeat so crushing? Ready or not, Chad Sweeney!”  --Matt Hart

“Chad Sweeney offers highly allusive and sonically textured lyrics that bring the reader to the edge of darkness, but always with a wink, the sense of menace tempered by the taut music of the pun.”  --Jacket2
“Sweeney’s poems reveal that language is parable, from the sound of a breath shaped by a mouth, to words artfully arranged on the page: there is much hidden . . . there is much to be discovered—”  --Poetry Flash