Death Styles

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.

In Joyelle McSweeney’s dynamic body of work, lyric intensity becomes a means of investigating the world in all its toxic radiance. A recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, her 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 Dead Youth, or the Leaks (2012) inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights; and her most recent double-collection, Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat, 2020), called a ＂frightening and brilliant book＂ by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize, won the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and earned her both a Literature Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the Guggenheim. 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. With Johannes Göransson, she is a cofounder of Action Books, an international press which has built readerships for major poets from across the globe, while centering translators and the art of translation itself. McSweeney is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her next collection, Death Styles, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.