Joyelle McSweeney
@JoyelleMcS
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Toxicon & Arachne. Nightboat Books, 2020. Death Styles, forthcoming from Nightboat Books, 2024. Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
South Bend, IN
Joined March 2018
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Came down w/my girl to the skate park in the rain to celebrate that Death Styles is now available from
@nightboatbooks
.
Won’t you buy a copy & join my cult of River Phoenix and Rust Belt Modernism?
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Someday I will tell you the story about how I spent the year after my baby died-- how much lonelier, more devastating, more exhausting, more financially ruinous it was made by the 'pro-life' laws of Indiana and the fecklessness of my private insurance. The idea that Amy Barrett's
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views on reproductive healthcare and access to healthcare are somehow not harmful to others and just a matter of personal faith she would never impose on others is a disingenuous lie. If Jesus believed in one thing, it was easing the suffering *specifically of women*.
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In case this is too vague, I'll spell it out. The "pro-life" culture that fetishizes motherhood (in white wealthy women only) forbids fertility treatments along with contraception and, of course, medicine derived from fetal stem cell research like Regeneron. They actively
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so doesn't just stop with Amy C. Barrett's personal beliefs, the whole system ripples outwards to cover the globe in misery.
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impede the 'wrong' people from becoming parents in the 'wrong' way, including barring reproductive services from queer and trans people, making it more difficult for queer and and trans people to adopt, and barring abortion and even contraception services in US clinics worldwide.
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Seeking healthcare, I travelled to another state and took out loans to pay for for treatment my insurance would not provide. My baby had just died, but I got up at 4 AM and travelled three hours in the dark by train along a cold, dark lake. I did this 3x per week on and off
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for a year, alone. It didn't work, possibly because I was too "stressed". That money, time, and the hours I could have spent healing at home are gone forever. I'm not the only woman who has been on these cold and lonely journeys. The loneliness of the bottom of the lake. Help us
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Folks it’s been a week, my whole family has COVID, this list is wild, I’m sad thinking of our lost friends, I’ve applied 5-6 times I think for this, I’m grateful to those who said keep trying.
I’m grateful and sad and happy and proud.
Today's the day! Congratulations to our new class of Fellows. These 180 individuals represent 51 fields of study. We're honored to give them the opportunity to pursue their passions under the freest possible conditions.
#guggenheimfellowship2022
Read more:
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I always liked Bernadette Mayer's work but I didn't know how much I *needed* it until the baby died. I pored over *Midwinter Day* to learn what it really means just to keep going w/no redemption, no transactional relationship btw art + survival. All transactions void. I developed
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COVER REVEAL: This unnerving yet irresistible orb now rises from its fever garden with news of a most peculiar nature: my next poetry book, Death Styles, shall appear in April 2024 from
@nightboatbooks
.
Thanks to the whole crüe at Nightboat and to
@dedreytnien
for the design!
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Our 13-yr-old staged a one-woman protest against racist police violence at the courthouse downtown. She’s carrying a collage honoring the victims and it centers the poem “Bullet Points” by
@jerichobrown
! Thank you Jericho for giving form and vision to her protest!
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I decided to make my poetry workshop syllabus more ecstatic.
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It’s been a year of extravagant fortune for me and I’m struck thinking of all the loved ones and poets who aren’t here but somehow tangled up in the hem of this moment— so grateful for the judge’s citation, which captures so perfectly what I think Art is for— so grateful
Congratulations to Joyelle McSweeney (
@JoyelleMcS
), winner of the Shelley Memorial Award selected by Rick Barot & Calvin Bedient.
The Shelley Memorial Award recognizes poetic genius and is awarded to a distinguished poet each year.
Read more:
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i wrote these poems in the Springtime after our daughter’s birth and death, deranged by grief and shock. God was nowhere, and man was no help, even Death wouldn’t have me, but Art was there for me, Lady Art. 1/3
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After a major trauma, you have to remind yourself you can celebrate, too. Folks, please help me celebrate that _Toxicon and Arachne_ is a finalist for this major prize for mid-career poets, the Kingsley Tufts award -- along with a super-group of finalists:
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I increasingly rely upon the generosity of strangeness— upon the kindness of strangeness.
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Was thinking today, it was when my kids learned to rlly read (like pick up a book, hit the couch & disappear) that they started solidifying into their true selves-- there's something abt that expansive interior private space that lets them take the measure of themselves--
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Your periodic reminder that the National Book Award for Translation excludes poetry— why? What does poetry in translation do/fail to do that places it outside/excludes it from publicity?
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Folks, I'm reeling. In a day where there is an absolute shortage of joy, I have the joy of sharing that the UK edition of Toxicon and Arachne is being released today from
@CorsairBooks
-- look at this enthralling cover--toxic blooms, spores, blessings--I want to close my hand ...
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Confession: I spent my once-in-a-lifetime Guggenheim year sitting in South Bend writing about Poetry in Translation.
Why? Not JUST to redress the invisibilization of the genre in so much US-based publishing/criticism/pedagogy/prize culture.
I had another plan in mind...
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I have some news to share-- My new poetry book, Toxicon & Arachne, will come out from
@nightboatbooks
in Spring 2020. It will be my first book of poems in eight years, and, as the title hints, it will be a double collection/1
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A strong rec for any syllabus, frm 1st-year comp to grad pedagogy seminars: Harryette Mullen's "Imagining the Unimagined Reader", which in 5 nimble pages denatures the canon & validates readers own sightlines on both canonical & non-canonical txts. Invigorating & yes, empowering
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The poems of Gayath Almadhoun, the latest Palestinian poet to have long-scheduled events cancelled in Berlin, are expansive, acute, full of an abundance of the very mysterium at the heart of poetry. It’s lit-up, tensile, and wide, like a caul that protects you from nothing.
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I just finished and submitted an essay I have been turning over and working on for over a year. Please clap.
It is a discussion of the Rust Belt, Baudelaire, and translation and it had its inception in this image of an abandoned hardware store I drive by every day:
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Some of you poets really want to be working for the wellness industry. What does
@PoetKimHyesoon
have to say?
"I don't think I've ever comforted anyone with my writing. I think literature betrays the readers' desire to be consoled. Perhaps literature crosses into a zone where -
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Folks, DEATH STYLES is now available for pre-order, if you are able and so inclined!
Having wrapped itself in a silk dressing gown and digested its own organs, _Death Styles_ will emerge in its final wingéd form April from
@nightboatbooks
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Wow, by some miracle this poem of mine from _The Red Bird_ is the Poem of the Day for
@PoetryFound
! Thank you, Poetry people! I think it’s still pretty good!
@FenceBooks
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Folks, Twttr has been *amazing* for spreading the word about new books, poets, & translation, & for reading older texts w/new eyes.
If this place becomes too rancid, we are going to have to recommit to + renew reviewing venues and cultures + care about each other's criticism.
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The poem she tells you
not to worry about: The actual poem:
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This year I went hard as hell on the Bernadette Mayer front, wrote poems born from the tension btw the ongoingness of daily writing vs the desire of grief to turn back. The poems, Death Styles, the best of my life, have been rejected almost everywhere-- I think bc they 1/x
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Folks, as the mother of a child who died of an unexpected birth defect, let me just say: it was unbearable to have no power and no choices. At 15 weeks, you're only beginning to get a picture of the viability of a pregnancy.
Don't let them strip you of your rights. Fight this.
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My newborn daughter couldn’t breathe; a birth defect discovered; airlifted to a children’s hospital. Child died. Claim for the Medivac denied as “failed to show medical necessity”. $27,000.00
What’s the most absurd medical bill you have ever received?
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Isn't it funny how "sport for sports' sake" is considered one of the highest, noblest sentiments going, while "art for art's sake" is held to be one the most excrable, anti-humane, morally dubious credos, even by most artists? Super glad to be part of the dirtbag remainder.
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Amazed that this came out 8 yrs ago. I formulated the Necropastoral so that somebody else could come along, unfold its odd proteins, snip it, dice it, mix it with something else, and make new monsters. I don't need to know everything or name everything. Anti-adamic. ALSO,
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It's been my longtime dream to publish a book by An Duplan and here it comes: in October, Action Book will release _ I Need Music_, an intimate, funny, profound work that totally reinvents ekphrasis as it contemplates + celebrates Black art in every medium. Reviewers, pls DM!
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What the actual fuck
At this rate the only platform for learning about new books is going to be prize longlists and folks I dunno if I can bear that, not least of all because poetry in translation and indie press poetry is underrepresented if not outlawed in those lists
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I can finally say with some satisfaction that I am writing something unhinged. As unhinged as I wanna be.
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As a hearing-impaired Indiana mom who does a lot of dishes, I am very picky about my audiobook narrators.
And I can tell you: Ethan Hawke's reading of Slaughterhouse-Five is the performance of a lifetime. And it's available thru yr public library on Libby.
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Such a wild surprise to wake up to my poem in the NYT— thank you,
@VChangPoet
for lifting up this tiny poem about how, after catastrophe, I tried to keep myself and my girls alive with Art — in the form of a Rust Belt performance of Phantom of the Opera — 1/x
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Roses are red, sessions are plenary,
A Tesla’s collision avoidance system detects an invisible man in a cemetery
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Young poets— like young people in love— have to take themselves seriously, since nobody else will. Missing the poets I was young with tonight💜💜💜💜💜💜💜
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It me, the 90s.
It also the living room we were only allowed into to have our picture made.
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So anyway Keats removed a bullet from some chick's neck when he was 20 and saved her life.
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Some folks want to live-laugh-love their way through all this grief..hope it works out for them…Someday I’ll tell you abt the looks the other parents gave me as my husband pulled me through the hospital hallway screaming. I’d broken the omertà. I was the worst that could happen
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When Arachne was born, I was finalizing Toxicon, poems meant to dazzle like a flight of poison arrows; after she died, I birthed a self-mesmerized griefbook, Arachne.
@nightboatbooks
helped me make a double-book that could hold them both, let them edify, en-riddle, co-gestate
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It’s my birthday and I’m chaperoning the teen trip to the pool.
That is all.
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"The most vexing — and ravishing — duplicity is that of art itself."
I'm dedicating this year to writing criticism that ignites new conversations abt poetry's (often occult) power & vitality-- I'm so thrilled to discuss
@MonicaYoun
's newest in
@nytimes
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As a bereaved mother, I am extended a lot of grace by poetry readers and my fellow poets. But the literature of bereaved fathers seems or more attenuated and occulted, maybe more feared…. I hope Johannes’s lilac’d new book about the death of our child will be widely read.
“It’s hard to dance with a baby’s breath”
Here are some poems from SUMMER that were in
@TheBrooklynRail
:
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"Good morning, Gaza. Get up."
Please read & share this new piece from Fady, translation & poetry moving in all directions from a site of traumatic grief in real time-- word, song, sound, greeting as traumatic time-keeping, signal, musicology of survival
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Nobody can say conclusively what what poetry is. Not one of us.
That’s because poetry opens to its opposite.
And that’s what Mallarme meant when he said “Destruction was my Beatrice.” (But in French).
Naturally only I know what Mallarme meant by this.
On the other hand
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Is it ok to have two poems about River Phoenix in this manuscript, if one is about when he had a bob?
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Don’t want to brag but I can now confirm that I have entered my late-Yeats phase, that is, channeling the dead and writing about gazebos. Related, if anyone is editing a special issue of gazebo poems, let me know.
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I used to spend the first couple of weeks of Intro to Poetry trying to persuade folks not to write like Dr Seuss and now I'm like, hmm, one could do a lot worse than write like the good doctor... This poem for example exemplifies most of my fave lyric moves...
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"Death Styles, I thought. Death Styles... it is a signal to me from the cat in the walls. A golden coin up the drain of my brain."
I'm so proud of my new book, Death Styles, & of this essay, which tells how I wrote it, how I wrote myself back to life.
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Hello friends. I have a book coming out, Toxicon and Arachne, from Nightboat in April. It’s my first poetry book in maybe five years and I go all out in my investigation of sound, lyricism, form, and grief
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Thanks,
@KavehAkbar
! You know, I usually think of villanelle as two lonely thoughts orbiting each other-- this time I felt the form create a fist, an eye, a valve opening and closing for such brief intervals-- I wanted to feel that breath on me-- I wanted it to close my eyes--
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Good news arrives in the middle of catastrophe--
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Having wrapped itself in a silk dressing gown and digested its own organs, _Death Styles_ will emerge in its final wingéd form April from
@nightboatbooks
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As horrific news emerges from Sudan, please join
@actionbooks
in elevating the voice of Sudanese poet & journalist Raina Mamoun, exiled to a US city after years of criticizing Omar al-Bashir.
Here's the opening poem of her recent Action title, _Something Evergreen Called Life
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Asked to write on Plath, I went walking in the colder-than-cold atmosphere of Ariel. Omicron, Lake Effect, grief for Arachne, so much felt specific & suspended in that super-cooled scene. Then a song boomed from Heaven: "What's cooler than being cool?" Here's what happened next:
"The mysterious fecundity of cold, its ability both to be ultimate and to make more of itself, defines Ariel."
Read
@JoyelleMcS
's essay on Sylvia Plath from the new issue of the
#PoetryReview
online now:
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While we're fighting, I 💜metaphors and esp. similes. Rather than harming our ability to 'see clearly', 'like' is everyday magic, close to hand, latching things precariously together, pointing the way to more. When I wanted to leave, 'like' kept me on the planet.
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“Hallelujah” is about the leap of faith that is intimacy, the ravishing joy and pain of being unguarded before other humans, beauty, oneself, maybe (maybe) God... we played it the one time we got to hold our baby, when we knew we’d have to let her go. Love is not a victory march.
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Waking up to this news, I feel so many things, but mostly: we did it.
@JohannesGoranss
,
@DonMeeChoi
, everyone who has been part of
@action__books
or cheered us on:
We really changed US poetry culture, all of our lives, & maybe the world.
💜💜💜 beloved
@PoetKimHyesoon
Incredible.
@PoetKimHyesoon
Phantom Pain Wings won in the Poetry Category
@bookcritics
Our wonderful editor Jeffrey Yang of
@NewDirections
accepting the award on Kim Hyesoon’s behalf. 🎉🕊️💫🪐🔥💕
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After our baby died, we both became addicted to hyperlyricism; I wrote Toxicon and Arachne; Johannes wrote Summer "I have been told to slash the diorama I won't I'm not as clean as that/ I hold the violent leaf in my mouth."
@TarpaulinSky
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To my fellow Gen-X-ish-and-adjacent writers and artists:
I feel like we were raised by Gen-X-culture to believe that being a hypocrite was the greatest, most mortifying, most disqualifying (secular) sin.
Is it?
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Trying to start writing again regularly after a couple bad years... pleased/dismayed to discover that I am still your girl for poems referencing both Bazooka Joe gum wrappers and Euripides _Bakkhai_.
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Hello friends, here's a Death Style I wrote-- about how, in my grief like Demeter-- I looked for signs everywhere-- that didn't arrive-- and how I wouldn't take off my sweatshirt-- and how the Ducks dressed better-- (it's in an ersatz Asphodel form)
"— you mean the only thing holding me / up or together?"
Winding enjambments, and river-like line breaks lead the eye in
@JoyelleMcS
's Death Styles 1.8.21. You can find the whole thing here:
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I’ve tried to unlearn my suburban ways, but broke down & told my 15yo she maybe should think a little abt college apps, maybe consider a club or two or a service project to round out her cv.
Today I was relieved to hear she’s taken my advice.
She’s joining the D & D club.
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It’s Arachne’s time. Three days to go. We’re feeling pretty bad. And here’s Poetry again to hold us up with its flame, light our way, lift us up over the dim terrain with its rose like a great balloon …
”Summer I am leaving now. Over there, in September
I have a rose I will entrust to you completely”
- Vallejo
(Trans Eshleman, sent to me by
@LaraGlenum
)
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Regret to inform you all that I am exiting my youthful and annoying Rimbaud-phase and transitioning directly into my raving and crabby late-Baudelaire phase with no mellow and serene middle period whatsoever.
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Take it from me when I say, you don’t know how these anti-choice policies are gonna affect you until you wake up one day in the worst situation of your life.
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Truly floored to receive this note from a goddess. I feel like Aeneas when his mother walks away-- et vera incessu patuit dea.
I have never done this —but this is a must read in poetry.
@JoyelleMcS
thank u. Thank
@cspaide
for your wisdom about it as well.
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You guyz
@TypoMagazine
is one of my fave mags hands down, and I’m v. proud of these toxic sonnets, which I wrote from the perspective of the tuberculosis bacteria that killed Keats... c’est moi. read the whole crown April 2020 in
_Toxicon and Arachne_
@nightboatbooks
....
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Our little child’s joy in his ballet class!
💜💚❤️💜💚❤️👾👾👾💜💚❤️💜
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Hello it’s two years yesterday since we lost Arachne and I hate those years. And the weirdest things are triggers for psychotic grief. The word “lucky” and “grateful” in any tweet. Those words mean nothing to me. The word “you” in any song. Sweetie. It’s always you.
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I’m doing something today I have wanted to do for a long time— teach
@NaropaU
.
We’ll look at hyperdiction, translation as terrain, the Japanese form Michiyuki, & read A. Berg, D. Dorantes, H. Itō, Juanito Keats, etc.
I’d describe the outfit I packed as “sporty-circus-clown”.
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Sean Bonney's _Baudelaire in English_.
I am undone.
Nobody can hurt Baudelaire, and nobody can hurt Sean Bonney, and some kind of winbeat of rage just flies up from this poem.
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So wild: a starred review for my upcoming book, Death Styles! I wanted to open the idea of style to include the style of a skunk, of dawn, of Vans, of River Phoenix (2x), & propose style itself as an exacting mode of survival.
Thank you,
@PublishersWkly
!
Pre-order if u can!
"If death is a style, then dawn is too, requiring “black Vans and Marimekko robe, the most expensive thing I own.”
Publishers Weekly praises
@JoyelleMcS
's Death Styles (forthcoming this spring from
@nightboatbooks
) as "poignant and unforgettable":
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True confession: I never cut my COVID hair when it was safe and now it’s too late.
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"Mom, can you come pick me up? They're talking about literature being *universal* again.
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SO knocked out by this response, bc I thought a lot about how to shape this book, whether to include a preface, explain the method or title…
& finally just decided to take a big swing & “cold open” with a big visionary poem about a SKUNK—both in and against the American grain…
I’ve only read the first poem in
@JoyelleMcS
’s Death Styles. I can’t get past it, keep re-reading. I don’t want to make a cheap tweet of it, so I’ll just urge you to read it for yourself.
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Thinking abt Joyce’s The Dead has me reeling in grief, loss, memory, how as a girl I recognized myself as an artist in Joyce, how this story’s abt all such self-mis-recognitions, one night in Dblin so long ago, how I never look at these photos anymore bc they remind me who’s dead
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One salubrious effect of poetry is to provide a curriculum of refusal, a continuingly renewing syllabus of NO. I hold it towards you.
"A tiny lady, so tiny
who lives in the heart of a bird
goes out at dawn to utter her only syllable:
NO. "
-Alejandra Pizarnik tr. Yvette Siegert
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ON BEING WARLIKE ---
Folks, I've spent this whole year trying to swing so hard in my poetry criticism-- and here's my biggest swing, an essay on the poetry of
@alice_notley
-- and maybe my own--
In the Spring issue of The Paris Review, we published an Art of Poetry interview with Alice Notley. To mark the occasion, we commissioned a series of short essays that analyze Notley’s works. The first, by
@JoyelleMcS
, published today.
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Getting ready to zoom teach with COVID from Anais Nin's Silver Lake love den
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Re: “Tortured Poet in a Private Jet” discourse:
I keep thinking about how this guy fled England, his creditors, his wife, and an upscale mob in a black coach emblazoned w/his family crest, including the family motto, “Trust Byron” —
which he had also bought on credit—
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To all my stylish friends, I suppose this as good a time as any, as the ship is going down, to say that my new book, Death Styles, is coming out in April, and I would love to visit your stylish community so we can all be stylish together!
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My mother (81), my son (3 tomorrow).
What it's like out here, Omicron Christmas, in the year of our Lord,
2021.
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Our uni is literally putting it out there that we should be willing to die for the fantastic experience of teaching in the classroom building. But I have a higher power to answer to: Divine. I only wanna die for Art.
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Hurrah for these translators, editors, and indie presses who built such a diverse, enthusiastic US readership for Annie Ernaux -- commitment, dedication, daring, vision, the whole shebang. Congrats and well done!
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Just sitting over here re-reading Paradise Lost and radicalizing myself.
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Hey kids: are u obsessed with style? My bk, Death Styles, due in Spring from
@nightboatbooks
, is consumed by the idea of style in all its manifestations: River Phoenix, Mantegna, a skunk. Here's my mood board + and here's my Medea:
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Ever since our little girl died I've felt almost physical revulsion at expressing gratitude. So can I really be said to have faith?
This question drives my essay on paths of art & faith in new bks by Hussein Barghouthi tr Fady Joudah
@PoetKimHyesoon
tr
@DonMeeChoi
New issue of
@Image_Journal
Joyelle McSweeney on Barghouthi + Hyesoon / Jake Romm on GODLAND / Poems by Chelsea Dingman, Jesse Nathan, Maryann Corbett / Interview with Miho Nonaka
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