Bøger af Joyelle McSweeney

Drama. Poetry. Winner of the 2013 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. In this farce set on a hijacked containership on its way to Magnetic Island, Julian Assange attempts to "reboot" a troupe of DEAD YOUTH--teenagers from all over the globe who have died in violent circumstances from sweatshop labor to environmental poisoning to war--but must grapple with two other would-be hijackers: a young Somali pirate and a female Antoine de St-Exupery. Described by its author as a "badly- wired allegory," DEAD YOUTH, OR, THE LEAKS brings to manic light the veiled violence that makes life in capitalism possible.

I want that green possibilitythe gravidity of late stylepregnant with self-possessionto spring me to the end of the plotMeanwhile I dream of Iphigeniaand how many times that teen can dropin her altar topWhen my teens are doing nothingthey are doing dance moves off TikToktheir brainwaves alteringlike the ones with wandswho wave the planes downand meanwhile I blow too muchdough on the baby's summerclothes. Ohwell, if he wears it just once*(*in the grave), then it's worth it.I say the secret thoughtin my brain like a sparkIt lays down and snuffsin the mossbane of the earbone.It dies a crib death.Bring me my toy stethoscope. No,I can detect nothing. Two beer canson a cord? No. Radio silence.--from '5.6.21 terminator 2, late style'

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.

'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... Frightening and brilliant' Dan Chiasson, New YorkerHow does the body gestate grief? How does toxicity birth catastrophe?In the months leading up to her daughter Arachne's birth, US poet Joyelle McSweeney set out to write a quiver of poems like a quiver of poison arrows: formally and sonically virtuosic, laced with the poet's obsessive concerns with contamination, decay and the sublime, featuring a crown of 'toxic sonnets' for the tuberculosis bacterium that killed Keats. But when Arachne was born with an unexpected birth defect, lived briefly and died, the poet was visited by a second welter of poems, odes of love, grief, perplexity and rage. These two books, Toxicon & Arachne, form a double collection of poems weighing love, grief, art and survival in increasingly toxic days.Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

An exploration of poetry as an expression of biology

This virtuosic poetry collection asks: how does the body gestate grief? How does toxicity birth catastrophe?