“Chard takes immigrant experience, recent history in Argentina, and a heady, but never unalloyed, religious sensibility and forges from those elements an immediate, striking poetry. What he seems to be aiming at is a kind of consolation. This is not consolation simply in an easy sense that in the Christian God, there is a place of rest and warmth, or that the sacramental can be present in the devastating discriminations meted out on the immigrant. But there is a sense that the cage can actually still amaze. That within our experience as fallen and falling, we need to maintain our gaze even when the world seems alien, even when we hold up our palms to shield that gaze from the sun.” — Ian Pople, The Manchester Review

“Chard’s tireless pursuit of the horse, and his mapping of all the lands and languages the horse leads us to, is the true and driving brilliance of his first collection of poetry, Land of Fire, published by Tupelo Press this March. This shrewd approach manages to capture the bleak contours of the American immigration landscape today, all the while blurring its edges. Chard is one of the most promising writers of migration today. His work is not simply an indictment of walls, but a careful tracing of their erection and the process by which we become encircled, and how we might yet find a way out.” — Levi Vonk, Longreads

“Chard’s debut collection of poetry takes its title from the English translation of Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of his Argentine motherland. The son of an American father and an Argentine mother, Chard unearths his cultural and linguistic heritage, laces it with Christian mythos and reflections on fatherhood, and ignites the mixture into smoldering flames, like the hillside fires of the native Selk’nam and Yaghan peoples that Magellan spotted in 1520 and that inspired the mountainous terrain’s namesake. Chard’s poems burst with allusions to biblical scripture, with migrants and prophets playing equal roles, embedded in searing landscapes rich with the distinctively windswept branches of banner trees in Patagonia, ‘like severed arms, the hands still grasping.’ ‘Dystocia’ reconceives the virgin birth: ‘Sometimes a myth / delivers its prophet // breech.’ Chard’s verses reverberate with such soft notes and quick turns, like the pause before a stunning full stop. ‘The Oath’ catches the speaker’s newly naturalized mother when ‘the cords that first / learned Spanish in her throat / spoke first.’ A deliberate, deftly rendered, multivalent collection.” — Diego Báez, Booklist Online