Toxicon & Arachne

Product Description '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. Review 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 Yorker This is a must read in poetry -- Jorie Graham Formally brilliant, emotionally heartbreaking, and considerably terrifying, this is a stunning work from one of poetry's most versatile experimentalists ― Publishers Weekly Starred Review McSweeney is one of our most dynamic poets of theme, mood, and syntax, and this new paired collection unifies those ranges in a most powerful fashion -- Nick Ropatrazone ― The Millions I've never read anything by Joyelle McSweeney that wasn't totally exciting. She's one of the most interesting people working now in terms of the forms she uses and she's extremely deft, and playful, and yet the stuff that's going on, content-wise, is really super-smart. Thrilling -- Dennis Cooper Biological, morbid, fanatic, surreal, McSweeney's impulses are to go to the rhetoric of the maternity mythos by evoking the spooky, sinuous syntaxes of the gothic and the cleverly constructed political allegory -- Carmen Gim�nez Smith This necessary, inventive lassoing-in of reality as we are presently experiencing it leaves no one "clean" or in the clear -- Claudia Rankine I am in deep awe of the resilience found in these pages, and the enduring strength and clarity these poems expel forth -- Prageeta Sharma Joyelle McSweeney is a poet with a vocation - a calling to the world. What is given her (the vocation) is to make others see what is given her to see -- Allen Grossman Book Description TOXICON & ARACHNE is a a raw, personal and indelible double volume of extraordinary lyric poetry, at once thrilling and sinister, by 'one of poetry's most versatile experimentalists' (Publisher's Weekly) From the Inside Flap '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".' Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker How 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 visit