Chad Morgan & Other Poems – Chad Morgan

These frank, neo-confessional poems blend observation, autobiography, and cultural criticism in an exploration of embodiment, identity, and identity-making. By turns wily, beguiling, clever, confrontational, and vulnerable, these poems engage literature, pop culture, music, and the movies in an exploration of the question, what do we mean when we say “I”?

Read three of the poems in Landfill.

And find a few in the Oyez Review, too.

About the Author

Chad Morgan’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Court Green, Columbia Poetry Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. They live in Chicago, where they spend most of their time watching television, reading celebrity biographies, and engaging in flanerie.

Praise for Chad Morgan & Other Poems

“I am enamored of the abundance and precision of chad morgan by chad morgan. Reading this heir to Hemphill and O’Hara reminds me that the lyric is like a dressing-room mirror, reflecting infinities of ourselves: made-up, sincere, alone, untouchable. How do we meet ourselves in this world, how many times must we replay its well-worn tape before something better pushes through? “I wake up and the world is still there, the aluminosilicate world.” This book with its marvelous observations opens up litanies of recognition– Spring, doves, “libertine daffodils which gape erogenously,” Julianne Moore wearing furs to the pharmacy in Magnolia. Like wearing furs to a pharmacy inside a magnolia, and being more, Chad Morgan’s poetry is lovely, rigorous, divine-adjacent, flooded with muses. You’re magnificent.” –Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne

” “My big problem is, I’m a person in the world,” Chad Morgan writes in his incisive, brilliant debut collection, chad morgan and other poems. Deftly balancing an ironic acidity with deeply felt humor and warmth, Morgan redirects the doomscrolling energies of our bleak historical moment, offering a vital reminder that we are delighted and delightful, desiring and desired, in our efforts to navigate this treacherous world. As he writes in “Practical Advice for Your Queer Son”: “Here, everything / is proof of your goddamn nerves.” ” –Tony Trigilio

“Chad Morgan’s debut poetry collection is suffused with desire, longing, ache, and oodles fantastic of pop culture references, which all alchemize into a beautiful excavation of the self. Morgan writes, “The goal is to talk myself into the world,” and that’s exactly what these gorgeous poems reveal in this dazzling book bursting with resonance and risk.” –Tiana Clark, author of “I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood”