The ice stayed but the water left - by Chad Weeden (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"These poems are sharp and glittering, poems about desire, relationships, loss. Chad Weeden's images are powerful, translating emotional states into sirens and flame, fog and stars. There's danger here, and beauty: "Funny how a flailing ripcord/makes us listen to the wind for the first/and last time." This is a gorgeous collection by a wonderful poet."

-Becky Hagenston, author of The Age of Discovery and Other Stories

"Chad Weeden's collection the ice stayed but the water left takes unlikely, even ordinary, moments, and infuses them with significance and even beauty. "He hovers above the sink like an old disease," he writes, and "Trash piles up when you're gone wrangling the infinite sea." The poems peel back layers to reveal deep truths- "...why we decorate the crawlspace with tea leaves and relics abandoned of exotic molds we try so hard to fit into we forget what it's like to be destroyed," and "What will burn will burn because it can. Not because it should." He explores the coldest grief and regret-"His one suit hangs on the bedroom door so you can take it to the funeral home," and "I am an echo between two windows," and "I was a burden. You were a chore . . ." Chad is a poet sensitive to nature in all her vicissitudes, sensitive also to sound and image. His poems sometimes whisper, sometimes scream. I'm blown away by the sheer beauty of this collection."

-Lori Baker Martin, Poetry Editor of The Midwest Quarterly

"Chad Weeden's poems are set in contemporary spaces: people navigating complicated logistics, pivoting from one room to another, reaching for the future while trying to put the past to rest. And yet, these lines transport us to a place of betweenness, a world of fertile bardos, Weeden's speakers navigating the underworld like a contemporary Virgil. Throughout this thrilling debut, a reader is ushered through archetypal domains, realms beyond the one with which we're so familiar. We're reoriented to the epic, the continuum that's always unfolding just beyond our comprehension. This is a book to celebrate, to read and reread."

-John Amen, author of Dark Souvenirs, Editor of Pedestal Magazine

"The stew that serves as the poetry of Chad Weeden is equal parts science, surrealism, and unyielding biological synchronicity that recognizes the magic in the everyday, and forces the reader to acknowledge their part in the flow. Poetry gives shape and sonic architecture to the unseen elements that comprise our lives, and in line after line, Weeden's poetry serves as a camera illuminating those various aspects and recording them, making tangible "the air in a piano and the inertia in a rented room." NC buys more books of poetry per capita than any other state and this is one collection from an up-and-coming Tarheel artist that I highly recommend you add to your library."

-Keith Flynn, author of The Skin of Meaning and Editor of Asheville Poetry Review