Joyelle McSweeney – författare

In The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, poet Joyelle McSweeney presents an ecopoetics and a theory of Art that reflect such biological principles as degradation, proliferation, contamination, and decay. In these ambitious, bustling essays, McSweeney resituates poetry as a medium amid media; hosts “strange meetings” of authors, texts, and artworks across the boundaries of genre, period, and nation; and examines such epiphenomena as translation, anachronism, and violence. Through readings of artists as diverse as Wilfred Owen, Andy Warhol, Harryette Mullen, Roberto Bolaño, Aimé Césaire, and Georges Bataille, The Necropastoral shows by what strategies Art persists amid lethal conditions as a spectacular, uncanny force.

'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.

In Toxicon & Arachne, McSweeney allows the lyric to course through her like a toxin, producing a quiver of lyrics like poisoned arrows. Toxicon was written in anticipation of the birth of McSweeney’s daughter, Arachne. But when Arachne was born sick, lived brie?fly, and then died, McSweeney unexpectedly endured a second inundation of lyricism, which would become the poems in Arachne, this time spun with grief. Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

"Flet" is set in a spaced-out, delimited future in which all cities have been evacuated after an "Emergency," and is named for its quiescent-but-full-of-agency female protagonist. Flet is an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the oft-invoked Emergency, after which all public spaces are off-limits, is a tool of sociopolitical manipulation, if not oppression: the decentralized citizenry binge on endless, aimless filetape transmissions drained into their homes. A face-off between this tentative muckraker and her icy superior is set to go down at a mandatory, nationwide Reenactment, in advance of which Flet finds herself dreaming and driving endlessly off the map. Will she find the missing cities, or will she lose herself in the flood-tide of images that wash over the Nation?An elegant entry in the field of speculative fiction, "Flet" finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination and syntax down to the speed of narrative.