Your Favorite Poet

Leigh Chadwick is an absurdist with a heart of gold, funny and strange on the page and always precisely herself, no matter the persona she’s taking on—including that of Your Favorite Poet. These poems are a party come to break your heart, wondrously smart and wonderfully weird.
— Matt Bell, author of Appleseed
My name is MM Carrigan, and this is a blurb endorsing Leigh Chadwick as Your Favorite Poet. I hope this will influence you to give Leigh Chadwick and Malarkey Books your money and attention. These are good poems, obviously my favorites.
— MM Carrigan, literary influencer and founder and editor-in-chief of Taco Bell Quarterly

The poems in this collection are about being alive and wanting to stay alive. They are poems teetering off a cliff. Poems created by the first and last feeling worth feeling. Poems about guns and sex and what follows both: daughters and husbands ducking from bullets. LeighChadwick weeps a collection that is both monstrous and intimate, terrifying and beautiful. With an eye for making the mundane extraordinary, Chadwick uses wit and charm to remind us that everything is bad, but we still have poetry. In this nightmare world, Your Favorite Poet is a dream.

Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-0879-4342-8
144 pages
$24

Paperback
ISBN: 9781088068519
144 pages
$15

Available direct from the publisher as well as Amazon, Bookshop, B&N, Indiebound, and most other book retailers.

Ebook

$3 in the Malarkey store
$5 on Kobo
$5 on Nook

Praise for Your Favorite Poet

Your Favorite Poet is charming as hell. It’s irreverent and flirty and fun. But don’t let that fool you; this book is also terrifying. Beneath their salty, sexy, self-referential surface, these poems are full of hard questions — and because this is America, most of those questions are about guns. Over and over, these poems explore with brutal honesty the dread of parenting in the age of school shootings. 'I hate that this is another gun poem,' the speaker says at one point, wishing instead to write about kissing under a streetlamp, and yet here we are. Leigh Chadwick offers us no easy answers, merely one poet’s journey through the horror, absurdity, mundanity, and beauty of what it’s like to be alive in this time, in this country.”

—Amorak Huey, author of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy 

"From suburban heart-sprawl to bacterial conjunctivitis to onions in the attic, Leigh Chadwick brings tears to the eyes. Mixing dubstep and dada, wit and luscious images, these poems are voice-driven kazoos in a church pew during communion. If Chadwick isn't your favorite poet, she may be your favorite poem."

—Alina Stefanescu, author of Dor

"Somehow I get the feeling that since Leigh Chadwick is here to write about our world that everything will be all right." 

—Maureen Seaton, author of Undersea

"True to its title, Your Favorite Poet delivers everything you'd expect of your favorite poet: crackling language, sharp intelligence, blistering insights, and the kind of heartbreak helixed with humor befitting a keenly observant writer wielding impeccable craft. Leigh Chadwick is a master of building and deconstructing a scene, a writer so dexterous at pivoting from one image to the next and so wrecking ball-powerful at shattering a narrative that every poem left me steeped in delight or devastation, wondering: how did she do that? Stop what you're doing right now and buy this brilliant book." 

—Todd Dillard, author of Ways We Vanish

“Reading Leigh Chadwick, I get the sense that there are many Leigh Chadwicks out there—which is a pretty comforting thought to me. Or maybe reading Leigh Chadwick gives me the sense that there are infinite versions of ourselves—each striving for perplexing and imperfect grace? In any case, it is comforting that we have this one Leigh Chadwick, the serious and hilarious writer who has filled her singular collection of poetry, Your Favorite Poet, with as much righteous indignation, feral silliness, and profound joy as a single version of any of us can take.”

—Shane Kowalski, author of Small Moods 

“From the very beginning, starting with the prologue, Leigh Chadwick wastes neither time nor words. She writes with an honesty and longing that chronicles what it is to be alive in such violent, unstable times—what it is to be a mother when nothing is certain. Her words offer hope and yet brutal honesty, and we must decide how to hold both at once inside each breath of her poetry.”

—Adrienne Marie Barrios, editor-in-chief of Reservoir Road Literary Review

Your Favorite Poet, Leigh Chadwick (Hardcover)
Sale Price:$20.00 Original Price:$24.00