The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (Poets On Poetry)

In The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, poet Joyelle McSweeney presents an ecopoetics and a theory of Art that reflect such biological principles as degradation, proliferation, contamination, and decay. In these ambitious, bustling essays, McSweeney resituates poetry as a medium amid media; hosts “strange meetings” of authors, texts, and artworks across the boundaries of genre, period, and nation; and examines such epiphenomena as translation, anachronism, and violence. Through readings of artists as diverse as Wilfred Owen, Andy Warhol, Harryette Mullen, Roberto Bolaño, Aimé Césaire, and Georges Bataille, The Necropastoral shows by what strategies Art persists amid lethal conditions as a spectacular, uncanny force.

Literature & Fiction

McSweeney, Joyelle

History & Criticism

University of Michigan Press

 In The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, poet Joyelle McSweeney presents an ecopoetics and a theory of Art that reflect such biological principles as degradation, proliferation, contamination, and decay. In these ambitious, bustling essays, McSweeney resituates poetry as a medium amid media; hosts “strange meetings” of authors, texts, and artworks across the boundaries of genre, period, and nation; and examines such epiphenomena as translation, anachronism, and violence. Through readings of artists as diverse as Wilfred Owen, Andy Warhol, Harryette Mullen, Roberto Bolaño, Aimé Césaire, and Georges Bataille, The Necropastoral shows by what strategies Art persists amid lethal conditions as a spectacular, uncanny force.

Winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize, selected by Allen Grossman. With the persistent, dappled vision of an ecstatic pragmatist, Joyelle McSweeney sees things as they are through "the modern knothole." Eventuality, delicately shaded by the fine and fearless intelligence of these kinesthetic arrangements, coincides with imaginative possibility; the resulting poems are as much mind as place.

The Red Bird

Literary

Fence Books

The brilliance of Joyelle McSweeney's poems is a given; what remains delightfully open to negotiation are its methodologies and its mien. In her second book McSweeney finds her subjects in the long form; The Commandrine is a verse-play that in nine scenes tells the story of sailors Zest, Coast, Ivory, and Irish, and their run-in with the Devil.

The Commandrine and Other Poems

Fiction. "If Vladimir Nabokov wanted to seduce Nancy Drew, he'd read her NYLUND, THE SARCOGRAPHER one dark afternoon over teacups of whiskey. Welcome to fiction's new femme fatale, Joyelle McSweeney."--Kate Bernheimer. "You thought you knew your own language. This book hands it back to you on a platter and includes the instructional manual for its further use."--Michael Martone. NYLUND, THE SARCOGRAPHER is a baroque noir. Its eponymous protagonist is a loner who tries to comprehend everything from the outside, like a sarcophagus, and with analogously ornate results. The method by which the book was written, and by which Nylund experiences the world, is thus called sarcography. Sarcography is like negative capability on steroids; this ultra-susceptibility entangles Nylund in both a murder plot and a plot regarding his missing sister, Daisy. As the murder plot places Nylund in increasing danger, his sensuous memories become more present than the present itself.

Nylund, the Sarcophager

Contemporary

Tarpaulin Sky Press

Fiction. "One would not make love to a Salamandrine during a sandstorm," wrote Aleister Crowley, anticipating by some sixty years the note of caution that Tarpaulin Sky must attach to the Black Book whose image now burns before you: Dear Reader, banish all received notions of narrative, of language itself. Masquerading as a collection of short stories, SALAMANDRINE is a channeled text, moonchild, unholy offspring of poetry and Loser Occult. Refracting the dread and isolation of contemporary life through a series of formal/generic lenses, producing a distorted, attenuated, spasmatic experience of time, as accompanies motherhood, Salamandrine renders impossible any thinking in terms of conventional temporalities or even causalities, let alone their narrative effects. SALAMANDRINE is the high magick of art so low it crawls. Like a toddler at a poetry reading. With a taste for achilles heels. Hell-bent on bringing literature itself to its knees. "If you would recover the empire over the Salamanders, purify and exalt the Natural Fire that is within you."——Abbé de Villars "He who shrinks from the flames will never command Salamanders."—Arthur Edward Waite

Salamandrine: 8 Gothics

'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\nHow does the body gestate grief? How does toxicity birth catastrophe?\nIn 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.\nToxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

Toxicon & Arachne

Poetry

Corsair

In Toxicon & Arachne, McSweeney allows the lyric to course through her like a toxin, producing a quiver of lyrics like poisoned arrows. Toxicon was written in anticipation of the birth of McSweeney's daughter, Arachne. But when Arachne was born sick, lived brie?fly, and then died, McSweeney unexpectedly endured a second inundation of lyricism, which would become the poems in Arachne, this time spun with grief. Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

Toxicon and Arachne

Nightboat Books

Death Styles

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McSweeney, Joyelle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McSweeney, Joyelle

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McSweeney, Joyelle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (Poets On Poetry)

The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (Poets On Poetry)

The Red Bird

The Commandrine and Other Poems

Nylund, the Sarcophager

Salamandrine: 8 Gothics

Toxicon & Arachne

Toxicon and Arachne

Death Styles

Death Styles