Chad Prevost

New Collection — Summer 2026

Mirage and Tar

"…strong music, a stone blind love of language (the only kind of love that matters), and a wild, wild heart." —Tom Lux

Mirage and Tar by Chad Prevost — long-exposure photograph of blurred figures on a city street

§ 01 · The Collection

Mirage and Tar maps the intricate spaces between what we know and what we feel.

The collection steps into the quiet, often overlooked voids of the human experience: the sudden absences, the shifting landscapes, the startling moments where our certainties fall away. With sharp, deeply grounded observation, these poems explore how we navigate time, memory, and the fragile architecture of our connections to one another. It is a testament to the weight of empty spaces.

Chad Prevost's fourth full-length collection of poems.
Crossroads · 2026 · $16 · ISBN 978-1-945064-29-6

In print this summer. For early copies, launch-reading invitations, or bulk orders, write to chad@crossroadspublishing.group.

A poem gets you somewhere thinking can't. These start in a driveway before dawn and end farther from shore than expected.

§ 02 · Two Poems from the Collection

Lightly

When you step, step lightly though you may not know where to go, but step and know you get there by going, not by thinking where to go. When you breathe, breathe lightly and trust the air to be there. Your breath knows what to do without thinking, but will follow the way you want to go. Before your mind takes hold commanding you around, hold these lines lightly as the trees bend to listen to the tessellating leaves. Before you go wandering to your next appointment and what you’ll have for supper, consider, if you will, the just returned hummingbird, sipping nectar, having flown unknown mountains just to be here living on the lightest branch your garden has to offer.

Mirage and Tar

Spectrum of light-reflected dalliance, ice crystals dot the lawn, beneath the haloed light from the kitchen window in the crisp pre-dawn while the dog finds his spot. The soul says there is nothing you don’t know. Beneath the yellow glow of my den- protected dreams, reading of brilliant lives gone to history, now and then turns back upon itself, like a steam- roller conjugates the exhumed earth into smooth conformity with pops of glitter, songs trapped in layers to plow over and salt for ice and snow and then to shimmer on the road in the heat as mirage and tar. Who stands a chance to consider all there is to know when every moment a million eyes reflect so many unseen particularities? Images held far return in close repose. We know the catastrophe of nothing.

§ 03 · The Collections

Four books of poems, twenty years of listening.

The Blue Demon — poems by Chad Prevost

The Blue Demon

Wing & the Wheel Press · 2014 · Poems

Sixty-six pages readers tend to finish in one sitting and then hold on to, a little surprised by the weight. Monologues that let other lives speak, city wind, waiting rooms, and the strange gladness of being anyone at all. A small book about how much life fits in one.

"I was able to experience existence through this poet's eyes so quickly, so thoroughly, that reality faded around me… There is so much life in this little book." — Holly Holt, Amazon reader review

"These poems are amazing… the kind of stuff that actually gets me excited about poetry." — a reader at Austin College, after a campus reading

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A Walking Cliché Coins a Phrase — poems by Chad Prevost

A Walking Cliché Coins a Phrase

Plain View Press · 2008 · Prose Poems, Letters & Microfictions

The title names the method: take the language everyone walks around inside — cliché, catchphrase, borrowed speech — and walk it somewhere true. Poems of wit and restless forward motion that wear the ready-made phrases of a life until they give way to a real one.

Related, at Matter: A Journal of Compressed Creative Arts: "A Walking Cliché Moves Back and Forth in Time and Becomes Self-Actualized."

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Snapshots of the Perishing World — poems by Chad Prevost

Snapshots of the Perishing World

WordTech Communications · Poems · His First Collection

Poems that hold still long enough for the passing world to show itself: sensual, briskly written, attentive to what is already leaving the frame. The debut that announced the voice.

"…vividly renders that world, so that what it declares evanescent seems eternal. In these sensual, briskly written poems, the world has never seemed more alive."

"…a storyteller's keen eye for detail and a grace for language… an essential first collection that should be read by everyone." — Virgil Suarez

Get the book →

§ 04 · The Chapbooks

Three short volumes, each its own small room.

Pudding House Publications

Chad Prevost's Greatest Hits

From the invitation-only Greatest Hits series — panel-selected, in the spirit of the recording industry's retrospectives: the twelve most-requested poems, opened by an introduction on the evolution of poet and poems. The series' own verdict: "Chad Prevost's terrific collection does not disappoint." The series lives on at Kattywompus Press.

Q Avenue Press

White-Feathered Bodies

A limited chapbook from Q Avenue Press, made the way small-press poetry is meant to be made: by hand, in small numbers, for people who keep such things. See it at Q Avenue Press →

Chapbook

Chasing the Gods

An early chase after the large questions in small compass — the chapbook where the spiritual register of the later work first speaks in its own voice.

§ 05 · The Anthologies He Edited

Rooms built for other people's poems.

Evensong: Contemporary American Poets on Spirituality

Evensong: Contemporary American Poets on Spirituality

Bottom Dog Press · 2006 · Co-edited with Gerry LaFemina · Harmony Anthology Series

A gathering of contemporary American poets on the life of the spirit — doubt included, doubt especially. "Please consider this anthology a meeting house: not everyone has shown up to services, but they're all here in spirit."

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Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes

Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes

C&R Press · 2009 · Co-edited with Ryan G. Van Cleave

One hundred and one new odes by ninety-five poets — Kim Addonizio, Denise Duhamel, Martín Espada, Thomas Lux, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gerald Stern among them — in praise of what deserves praising. Published by C&R Press during his years as its publisher.

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§ 06 · Praise for the Poems

"There is a huge heart at work here, a Whitmanesque desire to embrace the world and hold it close."

— Richard Jackson

Chad Prevost, wind-blown, head bowed — black and white
"…an utterly unique book of poems… filled with true wit (strange things go on in this man's head!), strong music, a stone blind love (the only kind of love that matters) of language, and a wild, wild heart."Thomas Lux
"This is the kind of work I admire — clear with subject and craft and thought. Great music, intelligence, speculation. A pleasure to read."Christopher Buckley
"…a powerful and deeply humane book of poems…"George Kalamaras
"…Chad Prevost takes us on a pilgrimage… these poems teach perseverance, the importance of being quiet, of listening to hear the cry of the heart."Vivian Shipley
"…these poems remind us how redemptive poetry can be, and how generous can be our poets."Gerry LaFemina
"…a storyteller's keen eye for detail and a grace for language… an essential first collection that should be read by everyone."Virgil Suarez

§ 07 · Readings & Appearances

For readings, festivals, and event inquiries:

chad@crossroadspublishing.group