Joyelle McSweeney Reads Death Styles

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, prose, drama, criticism and translation, inculding her recent poetry collections Death Styles and Toxicon and Arachne, her verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks, and her critical book The Necropastoral, a widely-read work of goth ecopoetics. With Johannes Göransson, she is co-founder of the international press Action Books which has helped build readerships for poets such as Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi, Aase Berg,and Raúl Zurita. She lives in South Bend, Indiana, and teaches at Notre Dame.

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.

An experience in deep listening, each Whole Cloth Reading Series event features a single poet who reads an entire book of poems from cover to cover. While poets devote immense craft to shaping a book, public readings tend to favor selections and excerpts. Uniting writer and audience in a celebration of expansive and unhurried attention, this series creates a rare environment for the investigation of poetry, sound, delivery and reciprocity. Each event features a transformative (short!) book and concludes in time for a cordial reception and conversation.

Series Conveners: Elee Kraljii Gardiner, poet; Bronwen Tate, Creative Writing