Portrait of Joyelle McSweeney by Anja Silber
Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning poet, playwright, novelist, translator and critic, Joyelle McSweeney is fiercely interested in what happens when art presses across national, linguistic, generic and bodily boundaries—creating fecund zones, releasing new energies, and configuring unimagined forms of thinking and living.
Toxicon and Arachne
Nightboat Books, 2020
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This virtuosic poetry collection asks: how does the body gestate grief? How does toxicity birth catastrophe?
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 briefly, 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.
REVIEWS:
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… 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.”
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
Formally brilliant, emotionally heartbreaking, and considerably terrifying, this is a stunning work from one of poetry’s most versatile experimentalists.