A record of daily bewilderments and accidental concessions to hope after a momentous loss, featuring John Waters, Divine, and Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria (the 'Swan King'), in this powerful follow-up to Joyelle McSweeney's award-winning collection Toxicon & Arachne
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Summary
A record of daily bewilderments and accidental concessions to hope after a momentous loss, featuring John Waters, Divine, and Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria (the 'Swan King'), in this powerful follow-up to Joyelle McSweeney's award-winning collection Toxicon & Arachne
Description
'McSweeney is one of our most dynamic poets' Nick Ropatrazone, The Millions
'I've never read anything by Joyelle McSweeney that wasn't totally exciting' Dennis CooperOne of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books for 2024In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely - River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk - McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day. In frank, mesmeric lyrics, Death Styles navigates the opposing forces of survival and grief, finding a way to press against death's interface, to step the wrong way out of the grave.Critic Reviews
Whether keening or mundane, hysterical or technical, these pages follow the mind's motion with associative detours... a poignant and unforgettable portrait of grief Publishers Weekly
An extraordinary book by a poet that rocks my world - and language -- Alina Stefanescu via X
A book of wonder; a language swimming in air, breathing in water -- Fady Joudah via X
About the Author
A recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, Joyelle McSweeney's published works span poetry, prose, drama, translation, and criticism. Her debut volume The Red Bird (2001) inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series; her verse play DeadYouth, or the Leaks (2012) inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights; and her most recent double-collection, her co-translation with Jack Jung, Don Mee Choi, and Sawako Nakayasu of Yi Sang's Selected Works received numerous recognitions, including the 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. Her influential volume The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) counters conventional ecopoetics by locating aesthetic and political possibility in such signature Anthropocene phenomena as mutation, contagion, contamination, and decay. McSweeney is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
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