Ghost/Home:
A Beginner’s Guide
to Being Haunted
Ricochet Editions, 2020
How does illness travel through us? What do we do with the parts of ourselves we feel but cannot grasp? In diagrams of ghosts, readings of Clarice Lispector, photographs, interviews, and lyric prose, Ghost/Home extends these questions into uncharted territory. Like its cover—an early Anna Atkins cyanotype, which transforms an image of algae into a ghostly figure—Ghost/Home transforms the experience of living with Crohn's disease into an invisible but pervasive entity.
“Through urgent, intimate prose and diagrams of hauntings, Ghost/Home shows us that ghosts are more than billowing curtains and flashes of light—ghosts are Crohn’s, ghosts are history, ghosts are feelings with nowhere to go. Rather than an exorcism, Sweeney coordinates a calling-in, a reckoning with the spirits that move through his body and shape his life.”
“Tracing the invisible thread that somehow tethers a body, its complex relationship with inhabiting and being inhabited, the conjurations here operate as compassionately examined intricacies of living in a wounded body…A tender embrace, this text will haunt you and heal you. A remarkable work; I couldn’t recommend this more.”
“What is it to be inhabited? What happens when it’s your body that is haunted? Whose is your body anyway? Ghost/Home asks all the right questions about flesh and spirit and health and not-health and how we live with our inheritances. All that and Clarice Lispector too!! An auspicious book.”
Other Press
• Small Press Distribution Bestseller, January-March 2020 and April-June 2020
• “Numbers Don’t Tell Full Story: On Ghost/Home and Haunting”, Blog Post at Kenyon Review
• Reading: Place, Body, and Memory: 2x2 Reading with Douglas Manuel, Caitlin Scarano, and Li Yun Alvarado
• Reading: Away Message #4 with L. Reeman, Jimena Lucero, Omotara James, & Joey De Jesus
Poems About Moss
Radioactive Cloud, 2018
Poems About Moss is: 1) poems named after moss; 2) collages named after moss; 3) an essay that grows and grows. Specifications: hand-built, hand-stapled edition of 50, with two-color silk-screened cover using sketches from Elva Lawton’s monumental Moss Flora of the Pacific Northwest.
Poems first appeared in Cloud Rodeo, Fog Machine, ICHNOS, Reality Beach, Reality Hands, and Yalobusha Review. Moss collages appeared in Boston Review’s What Nature special issue and 3:AM.
Poems About Moss is SOLD OUT at Radioactive Cloud.
THREATS
alice blue books, 2015
THREATS (the chapbook of poems) is based on THREATS (the novel) by Amelia Gray. In 24 micro-poems, THREATS (the chapbook) threatens you, but it doesn’t mean it. Poems from THREATS previously appeared in alice blue review.
Although the publisher has closed its doors, a few copies remain. If you’d like one, get in touch.
What They Took Away
CutBank Books, 2014
Winner of the 2013 CutBank Chapbook Prize
“Dennis James Sweeney’s What They Took Away is an epic apocalypse of the minutiae, an apocalypse of life stripped of tedium, of obtrusiveness. Sweeney’s magical miniature world showcases the terror of erasure and the wreckage of return. This is a book of oracular providence.”
In hybrid prose vignettes, What They Took Away examines the meaning of absence in a full world—and the meaning of return, when absence reaches its limit.
What They Took Away is SOLD OUT at CutBank Books.