Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era

Chad Bennett’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Offing, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Volta, and elsewhere. He is the author of Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry, a study of twentieth century poetry and the queer art of gossip. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

Longlisted for the Julie Suk AwardFinalist for the Writers' League of Texas Book Award”Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin,” Poets & Writers”A Reading List for Pride Month and Beyond,” CLMP"Must-Read Poetry: January 2020," The Millions"Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2020," Big Other"Versifying / Collection Development: Poetry," Library Journal”National Poetry Month 2020 Reading List,” Outsmart: Houston’s LGBTQ Magazine”Mayor’s Book Club Says: ‘Read Local,’” The Austin Chronicle"The sensual, vulnerable debut by Bennett reckons with queer history and identity through short prose pieces and lyric poems '[S]et adrift on history’s inch.'"—Publishers Weekly"Bennett’s songs of longing are clever and carefully rendered—smooth control over lines being only one defining element of this welcome debut collection."—"Must-Read Poetry: January 2020" by Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions"Bennett is expert at seamlessly exploring queer icons, tropes, sorrows, and celebration."—"New in January,” LAMBDA Literary“Stunning.”—”National Poetry Month 2020 Reading List,” Outsmart: Houston’s LGBTQ Magazine"At once daring, humorous, and tender, these poems show the mind at work exploring what it means to live in the body, to desire and be desired."—American Literary Review“It is rare for a book of poems to be both rooted in a consistent thematics while also existing, and therefore thriving, as a place where these themes can live and think on the page and in the world. They declare their own truths without reducing themselves to definitives. Their metaphors act as epicenters, where queerness is not a category or subgenre, as it’s often expected to be, but is the only bones—irreducible and undeniable—in which these poems stand. The manuscript haunted me in searing and challenging ways—the best ways—and I returned to it through the weeks, as a traveler returns to new terrain, all the while reminded that, in the end, regardless of who we are to each other, ‘what we have is small / and strange. But true.'” —Ocean Vuong, Judge 2018“Just when you think poetry's sort of done everything, along comes Chad Bennett to give it all a fresh makeover. Disarmingly frank, sensual, experimental, and approachable, this is a glorious homage to queer culture as well as a moving personal account of living through the era of change.” —D.A. Powell “In Chad Bennett’s poems, the thinking is intimate and the vulnerability razor-sharp. His forms embody the past and the now, and his language is exact and charged; each word, beautifully stapled down, radiates to make visible the contours of the self wrestling with desire and isolation. 'What I hide with my language my body utters,' writes Bennett (adapting Roland Barthes), reminding us queerness, though hypervisible, often lacks intellectual and emotional depth in our society. Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era argues against such erasure. The poems are astute, moving, and exquisite.”—Eduardo Corral