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 Mc Sweeney 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—Mc Sweeney 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.
About the author
A recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, Joyelle Mc Sweeney’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. Mc Sweeney is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her next collection, Death Styles, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.
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