Joyelle McSweeney – författare

''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 YorkerHow 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.

''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.

A record of daily bewilderments and accidental concessions to hope after a momentous loss.

In 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.