{"title":"Joyelle McSweeney","description":"\u003cp\u003eJoyelle McSweeney (born 1976, Augusta, Georgia) is an American poet, playwright, fiction writer, and theorist known for her apocalyptic, genre-bending, and intellectually radical work. She is the author of numerous books, including Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), Salamandrine: 8 Gothics (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013), and the critical work The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (University of Michigan Press, 2014). Her poetry blends horror, classical mythology, pop culture, and political critique in a mode she has called the Necropastoral. She co-founded Action Books, a press specializing in international poetry in translation, and is a professor at the University of Notre Dame.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"death-styles","title":"Death Styles","description":"\u003cb\u003eA record of daily bewilderments and accidental concessions to hope after a momentous loss.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this follow-up to her award-winning collection, \u003ci\u003eToxicon and Arachne\u003c\/i\u003e, 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, \u003ci\u003eDeath Styles\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Joyelle McSweeney","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43805966368810,"sku":"9781643622309","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/death-styles-3696285.jpg?v=1762481024"},{"product_id":"toxicon-and-arachne","title":"Toxicon and Arachne","description":"In Toxicon \u0026amp; 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 \u0026amp; Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.","brand":"Joyelle McSweeney","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43805966499882,"sku":"9781643620183","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/toxicon-and-arachne-1602926.jpg?v=1762481024"},{"product_id":"red-bird-1","title":"Red Bird","description":"\u003cp\u003eWinner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize, selected by Allen Grossman. With the persistent, dappled vision of an ecstatic pragmatist, Joyelle McSweeney sees things as they are through \"the modern knothole.\" Eventuality, delicately shaded by the fine and fearless intelligence of these kinesthetic arrangements, coincides with imaginative possibility; the resulting poems are as much mind as place.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"The Red Bird has more in common with a fast red car, except that it does, indeed, fly. Within its agile slips and twists, McSweeney has managed a rare insight, casting our own historical moment as the postmodern medieval, full of knights running errands, where Machu Piccu, Radio Sucre, and lawn chairs all take on Biblical proportions. Except that it's really Darwin we're talking about, as he careens around the globe. She deflates this and other old battles by giving us new terms: 'O beautiful he produceth \/ language from everyplace \/ on his body. . .' This is a stunning first book. It glows in the dark.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e-Cole Swensen\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"[McSweeney's] poems are neither reductive nor fantastic. But they are profoundly mysterious in the way any truthful account of the world must be. 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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e-Allen Grossman\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"In describing, in turn, a \"Toy House,\" \"Toy Bed\" \"Toy Enterprise,\" \"Toy Election,\" \"Toy Maternity,\" and nine separate accounts of \"The Voyage of the Beagle,\" one might think Joyelle McSweeney lacks high seriousness in The Red Bird, selected by Alan Grossman for Fence Books. While certainly playful and relentlessly up to date (check the \"Celebrity Cribs\" poem), McSweeney's is a satirist's sensibility, wickedly sending up, in \"Avian light,\" the identities and settings her speaker encounters, whether in books, \"a maritime chart of the Yensai Delta\" or \"Afterlives\" \"Forsythia opens its bright palm and the woman pushes her stroller out of it.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e-Publishers Weekly\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Joyelle McSweeney","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43805966598186,"sku":"9780971318908","price":12.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/red-bird-7252783.jpg?v=1762481024"}],"url":"https:\/\/thepoetryshop.com\/collections\/joyelle-mcsweeney.oembed","provider":"The Poetry Shop LLC","version":"1.0","type":"link"}