Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781643622309

Table of Contents

Reviews

"Named one of Lit Hub's ""Most Anticipated Books of 2024""  ""After McSweeney's infant daughter died, she found herself unable to write for two years. She made her way back via the torrent of poems in this collection; the result is like a volcano, spewing details of pop culture and regular life amid waves of grief and perseverance."" —The New York Times Book Review ""The lyric poems in this collection explore the tension between surviving loss and the overwhelming resistance to hold on to it. . . [Death Styles] offers grief a vessel, transmuting it from hopeless haunting into fecund—and mortal—form."" —Gabriela Denise Frank, BOMB ""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 Starred Review ""McSweeney captures how trauma bleeds through everything. . . anguish wells out of her poems as she works to ""reconcile grief's desire to look backward with survival's command to move forward."" —Vikas Turakhia, Star Tribune ""It is an unflinching eye that captures terrible beauty and beautiful terror in equal measure. But in McSweeney’s poetry, this dialectic is undeniable."" —Anne Gerard, The Rumpus ""In Death Styles, Joyelle McSweeney summons for contemporary poetry the poetic force and historical reckoning of the baroque. Her mantic ear reminds us that the baroque is not an aesthetic of bewilderment so much as it is a reckoning with those conditions of lost authority, endangered offerings, the sovereignty of exception, and the debts of death that bewilder our searches for the ancient dawn. This work of daily midwestern catoptromancy by a poet who sees with her ears her incident irradiance is as brilliantly brutal as history itself.""—Edgar Garcia ""One is a mother, able to show the reality of the world without sugarcoating it. One learns to decipher the path toward that destination with her daughters’ minds in tow. One migrates among circumstances, studying the position of the sun, the Milky Way, and the social pressures, compounded by everyday violence, that will overcome our daughters. It’s neither a coincidence nor a simple, respectable manifestation of love that Death Styles, by Joyelle McSweeney, is dedicated to her daughters. It’s difficult to observe oneself and the irremediable social absurdity that one is supposed to represent through motherly love. The obviousness of (supposed) womanhood, the death of creativity intertwined with privilege, the suffering of ordinary life, its responsibilities, the guilt of living in a gilded cage, or the cage of motherhood: all these themes traverse the poetics of Joyelle McSweeney and forge, together, a terrifying, beautiful, utterly singular book.""—Dolores Dorantes, translated by Robin Myers ""McSweeney’s words. . . give voice to living in the face of grief.""—Mercer Thomas, The Kenyon Collegian ""The poems in Death Styles turn a crank that ratchets a moment open, wider and wider, to offer a remarkable, material illustration of grief and of the enormous capacity of what the present can hold."" —Rosalie Moffett, Indiana Authors Awards"

"""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 ""The power of McSweeney's work cannot be separated from its association with forms of oracle and soothsaying. . . . The kamikaze fantasy arises, like everything in this frightening and brilliant book, not from a pleasant 'brainstorm' but from the animal reflexes of the 'brainstem.' The defeat is total: a rout, a blowout. Now that the tables have been permanently turned, 'the popsong ""plays"" on ""the toy turntable""' in the nursery and also--you can hear the faint pun--'in eternity.'""--Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker ""McSweeney is much more formally inclined--the book contains a crown of sonnets and two sestinas, perhaps the only good sestinas I've ever read. In the free verse poems too, sound and rhythm are the governing principles, with deeper connections almost feeling like a bonus to the surface pleasure of the sonic riffing.... At their most disorderly, McSweeney's poems highlight errors of history, genetics and luck -- and that contemporary feeling of being in the wrong timeline."" --Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times"

Author Information

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 Dead Youth, 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. Her next collection, Death Styles, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available