“So, this is where I find the poetry I cannot stop reading, ‘so hot it burned the air of enemy.’ Dennis James Sweeney's precise choices lend to a perfect economy of language, the kind of place a reader feels room to trust and blossom, die, and grow again.” —CAConrad, author of First Light

"Sometimes otherworldly, sometimes metaphysical, often breathy and prayerful, these elusive lyrics move through uneasy embodiment and oceanic consciousness, neither knowable without the other. Sweeney’s poems are porous islands of resolute openness, unclosed circuits of intimate lyric address that reach for their objects and beloveds without grasping or possession. In the provisional temporality of long poems titled 'Untils,' which are set in white type on black pages, Sweeney inverts 'categories of luminescence.' Until and within inevitable cataclysm, until and within the eclipse of hope, these poems make visible a negative space that nonetheless leaves open the possibility of tenderness, sustenance, and survival—of the intention 'to love the way a star loves, in a tense / that cannot be replicated, with unabsolved / ache for the heart of a distant planet / that can only result in explosion.' Illuminated by that distant heat, and by biolamps along the 'borderlands of yet,' these are poems of the persistence of life and light." —B.K. Fischer, author of Ceive 

"Intimate and haunting, Dennis James Sweeney’s Biolamp is a climate lament teeming with ghostly ecologies. As I read, I could see our extractive relationships with Earth in a mythic light. Each poem is urgent, present, but also resonant with voices from deep time. You’ll find 'mythed water,' 'sun in a cup to drink,' and a world—our world—where '[t]rees close in like letters to themselves,' and 'the dead swim tirelessly / In rings around the wet earth.' A gorgeous and timely collection." —Danielle Vogel, author of A Library of Light

Dennis James Sweeney is the author of several books across and between genres, including In the Antarctic Circle, which won the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize for poetry, the lyric nonfiction collection You’re the Woods Too, and The Rolodex Happenings, a novella. Most recently, they are the author of a guide for writers, How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses. Sweeney's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Southern Review, and Witness, among others. They have an MFA from Oregon State University and a PhD from the University of Denver. Originally from Cincinnati, they live in Amherst, where they teach at Amherst College.