Toxicon & Arachne

'The power of McSweeney's work cannot be separated from its association with forms of oracle and soothsaying, and so it is uncanny that it should arrive in the middle of a global pandemic... Frightening and brilliant' Dan Chiasson, New Yorker

How does the body gestate grief? How does toxicity birth catastrophe?

In the months leading up to her daughter Arachne's birth, US poet Joyelle McSweeney set out to write a quiver of poems like a quiver of poison arrows: formally and sonically virtuosic, laced with the poet's obsessive concerns with contamination, decay and the sublime, featuring a crown of 'toxic sonnets' for the tuberculosis bacterium that killed Keats. But when Arachne was born with an unexpected birth defect, lived briefly and died, the poet was visited by a second welter of poems, odes of love, grief, perplexity and rage. These two books, Toxicon & Arachne, form a double collection of poems weighing love, grief, art and survival in increasingly toxic days.

Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

“The power of McSweeney's work cannot be separated from its association with forms of oracle and soothsaying, and so it is uncanny that it should arrive in the middle of a global pandemic... Frightening and brilliant”

-- Dan Chiasson New Yorker
This is a must read in poetry -- Jorie Graham
Formally brilliant, emotionally heartbreaking, and considerably terrifying, this is a stunning work from one of poetry's most versatile experimentalists Publishers Weekly Starred Review
McSweeney is one of our most dynamic poets of theme, mood, and syntax, and this new paired collection unifies those ranges in a most powerful fashion -- Nick Ropatrazone The Millions
I've never read anything by Joyelle McSweeney that wasn't totally exciting. She's one of the most interesting people working now in terms of the forms she uses and she's extremely deft, and playful, and yet the stuff that's going on, content-wise, is really super-smart. Thrilling -- Dennis Cooper
Biological, morbid, fanatic, surreal, McSweeney's impulses are to go to the rhetoric of the maternity mythos by evoking the spooky, sinuous syntaxes of the gothic and the cleverly constructed political allegory -- Carmen Giménez Smith
This necessary, inventive lassoing-in of reality as we are presently experiencing it leaves no one "clean" or in the clear -- Claudia Rankine
I am in deep awe of the resilience found in these pages, and the enduring strength and clarity these poems expel forth -- Prageeta Sharma
Joyelle McSweeney is a poet with a vocation - a calling to the world. What is given her (the vocation) is to make others see what is given her to see -- Allen Grossman

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eight genre-crossing books, from her debut volume The Red Bird which inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2002 to her influential work of Decadent ecopoetics, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults in 2015. She has written lyric prose, verse plays, Gothic tales and absurdist farces and is interested in hyperdiction, anachronism, and the uncanny prerogatives of Sound and Art, including the political force of non-compliance in all its manifestations. With Johannes Goransson, she founded the internationalist press Action Books and teaches at the MFA program at Notre Dame. She lives in South Bend, Indiana.

'The power of McSweeney's work cannot be separated from its association with forms of oracle and soothsaying, and so it is uncanny that it should arrive in the middle of a global pandemic... Frightening and brilliant' Dan Chiasson, New Yorker How does the body gestate grief? How does toxicity birth catastrophe? In the months leading up to her daughter Arachne's birth, US poet Joyelle McSweeney set out to write a quiver of poems like a quiver of poison arrows: formally and sonically virtuosic, laced with the poet's obsessive concerns with contamination, decay and the sublime, featuring a crown of 'toxic sonnets' for the tuberculosis bacterium that killed Keats. But when Arachne was born with an unexpected birth defect, lived briefly and died, the poet was visited by a second welter of poems, odes of love, grief, perplexity and rage. These two books, Toxicon & Arachne, form a double collection of poems weighing love, grief, art and survival in increasingly toxic days. Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

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