The poems in this collection are about being alive and wanting to stay alive. They are poems teetering off a cliff. Poems created by the first and last feeling worth feeling. Poems about guns and sex and what follows both: daughters and husbands ducking from bullets. Leigh Chadwick weeps a collection that is both monstrous and intimate, terrifying and beautiful. With an eye for making the mundane extraordinary, Chadwick uses wit and charm to remind us that everything is bad, but we still have poetry. In this nightmare world, Your Favorite Poet is a dream.
Praise for Your Favorite Poet:
"Leigh Chadwick is an absurdist with a heart of gold, funny and strange on the page and always precisely herself, no matter the persona she's taking on-including that of Your Favorite Poet. These poems are a party come to break your heart, wondrously smart and wonderfully weird."
-Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
"Somehow I get the feeling that since Leigh Chadwick is here to write about our world that everything will be all right."
-Maureen Seaton, author of Undersea
"True to its title, Your Favorite Poet delivers everything you'd expect of your favorite poet: crackling language, sharp intelligence, blistering insights, and the kind of heartbreak helixed with humor befitting a keenly observant writer wielding impeccable craft. Leigh Chadwick is a master of building and deconstructing a scene, a writer so dexterous at pivoting from one image to the next and so wrecking ball-powerful at shattering a narrative that every poem left me steeped in delight or devastation, wondering: how did she do that? Stop what you're doing right now and buy this brilliant book."
-Todd Dillard, author of Ways We Vanish
"From suburban heart-sprawl to bacterial conjunctivitis to onions in the attic, Leigh Chadwick brings tears to the eyes. Mixing dubstep and dada, wit and luscious images, these poems are voice- driven kazoos in a church pew during communion. If Chadwick isn't your favorite poet, she may be your favorite poem."
-Alina Stefanescu, author of
