In the Antarctic Circle

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In the Antarctic Circle is also available as an audiobook.

Praise for In the Antarctic Circle:

“Of literary ‘whiteness’ Toni Morrison asked, ‘What is it for?  What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as “American”’?  In this extraordinary debut collection, Dennis James Sweeney revisits the question via the snowy, violent terrain of love, loss, and supreme isolation.  What is the Antarctic Circle and why would anyone willingly live there?  It was once promoted, perhaps, as a pristine place, a place to start over, to begin anew.  But one cannot leap to newness without acknowledging ‘[t]he ancient lies [that] rise and gather blackly at the ceiling,’ without those pesky blank pages that ‘intentionally [hint] at loss,’ or without a nod to the ‘Black toboggans of the future’ Sweeney observes. Through the lenses of dystopia and domestic upheaval, the poet braces us for the shrewd chill of this ultimately uninhabitable place.  You almost want to direct the speaker-protagonist and lover Hank to turn back.  It’s a fool’s errand.  But you can’t stop flipping the pages: ‘Though no savior is due, we make a life of waiting.  Everyone has every reason to fold.’“

—Yona Harvey, Author ofYou Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love

“This elliptical, haunted document is as beautiful and dangerous as the cold continent of which it sings, whispering of loss, of loneliness, of identity, of extinction. A perfect Beckettian marriage between the spoken and the unspoken, the said and the unsayable, this sublime collection speaks as much from its white spaces as from its exquisitely ordered text. In the Antarctic Circle is an unforgettable experience from a master stylist.”

—Maryse Meijer, Author ofThe Seventh Mansion

“What is love in a habitat in crisis? How does desire survive when the land offers no mercy? These are the questions of Dennis Sweeney’s In the Antarctic Circle, with its precise and surrealist depictions of ice, snow and wind coupled with aching gestures toward the lover’s warm body, somehow always out of reach. ‘I am alone in the whiteness. I stretch into it and huddle.’ We don’t have to visit Antarctica to understand the thrust of these questions; all our landscapes now threaten to reject us. And nonetheless, ‘the living are marking what they can.’ This exquisite writing is a testament to the effort to survive and to love within a self-generated hostility, a ‘climate’ of ‘whiteness’ in which we can only, ‘hold our wounds dear, open them repeatedly.’”

—Julie Carr, Author of Real Life: An Installation

“We might consider this a prose-poetic play, discovered in scorched fragments. Each poem has coordinates as its title, leaving us somehow both exact and dizzied. Where are we? Hints of Samuel Beckett and William Gass (snow, wind, eternity, terror) haunt this book. ‘You will learn,’ the narrator warns: ‘In a whiteout you cannot see shadows, but that does not mean the edges are not there.’”

—Nick Ripatrazone, "Must-Read Poetry: March 2021, The Millions

“Swaying between the personal, the ecological, and the political, Sweeney’s book opens inner worlds amid the snowy void of Antarctica. The book is also a map, tracing the journey of making relations in a frozen world: ‘You can’t map emptiness. Only affiliations.’”

—Joseph Albernaz, Public Books

“The book speaks through its white space, including blank moments and pages that communicate loss, mourning, alienation, and the inability to escape the stagnation of the present moment, a moment just before a climate disaster hits. The narrator asks for change from a marginal place, a place both empty and full to the brim with ghosts, scientists, the specter of climate change, and the occasional spark of blood on the snow.”

—Marin Killen, Heavy Feather Review