About the Author

Cody Roggio lives in Philadelphia with his two cats. He works in the field of addiction and recovery and dabbles in the arts.

Author photo provided by the Author

Reviews

“The first book in a long time that made me feel an exhale. Cody Roggio’s A Switch Flipped in Me surpasses Step Eight and its demand for amendment and instead enlivens, makes glow, a carousel of stunning obituaries. These stories have the gentle-but-firm stroke of genius that make the mundanity of melancholy appear fantastical. Cody does more than tease hope. He has written something that might preserve someone’s future.  The work delivers deliverance to the reader if not the writer, cultivated by an expert handler of lyric craft and unforgettable voice. A Switch Flipped In Me finds the laughable in the cry-able and the cry-able in the laughable. I certainly cried. Even the book’s structure says the scary part out loud, but simultaneously proves the future starts on any given day. This is a collection of forever moments that will nestle in the most beloved coffee shop of your mind. Not a fancy one. One owned by a cool dad. Peruse at will when you need a friend. Thank you, Cody.”

—L Scully, author of Self-Romancing

“A narrator becomes fifty bats. His prom date is Stephen King’s Carrie — don’t worry, she goes on to be the queen of a post-apocalyptic village; there’s a Marshall’s just outside the city limits with candles that smell like your parole officer’s disapproval or your dead cat’s morning breath. Cody Roggio challenges the conventional drug use —> recovery narrative by populating A Switch Flipped in Me with surreal beats, bleak and punishing in their own right, alongside the more severe, familiar story. These brief escapes (cloud chasing cops, every past girlfriend in the same cemetery) begin as relief from the reality an addict is forced through, but soon turn tearful and sincere. The moments outside harsh truth in Roggio’s collection become all the more difficult to bear once the reader realizes they are clearly fiction.”

 —Graham Irvin, author of I Have a Gun and Liver Mush

“Not Great/Thanks for Asking is a steadily compelling and occasionally hilarious collection of short stories. Roggio creates a nice home for the poetics of disarray and has a generous, intuitive way with storytelling. The gritty, casual tone is familiar—it’s like a hometown, it’s like Philly, it’s like looking at Polaroid photos taped up on someone else’s bedroom wall and making up memories to place yourself in those snapshots. One piece asks, “remember when we riffed for hours...” and yeah, I almost can.”

 —Alexandra Naughton, author of American Mary, Sick of Being Inside Myself and publisher of Be About It Press 

  “I first met Cody Roggio when I read some of my stories at a bar in Philly a few years ago. I immediately thought he was trouble, like he was someone’s SoundCloud rapper boyfriend who took too many pills and wrote poems about it. I was mostly right, because the poems in his debut collection, Not Great/Thanks for Asking, have this nice, dopey, youthful ache that I’m drawn to, where someone is having to navigate some shitty relationship or some shitty addiction or some shitty malaise about existence or whatever. That’s my shitty shit. And I do really like Cody and I enjoy these poems and I think you will too, even though I still kind of think he’s trouble, so here’s my blurb: “Cody Roggio is a new, troubled talent full of sad charm.” 

—Brian Alan Ellis, author of The Errors Tour: Collected Poems (2019-2024) and publisher of House of Vlad

 “Roggio’s Not Great/Thanks for Asking is kisses in cemeteries with the person you’ve been longing for; each a small granite monument to meaningful love and even more meaningful loss. Emotionally honest and tenderly rendered, these hybrid reflections are filled with hollow loneliness giving way to moments of hope: filling us with the possibility that maybe things will work out. Maybe we can be happy.”

  —Jane-Rebecca Cannarella, author of Eleven Hundred, Better Bones, and editor of HOOT Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow