Böcker av Joyelle McSweeney

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'

'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.

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

An exploration of poetry as an expression of biology