Death Styles

'McSweeney is one of our most dynamic poets' Nick Ropatrazone, The Millions

'I've never read anything by Joyelle McSweeney that wasn't totally exciting' Dennis Cooper

One of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books for 2024

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.

About the Author

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eight genre-crossing books, from her debut volume The Red Bird which inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2002 to her influential work of Decadent ecopoetics, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults in 2015. She has written lyric prose, verse plays, Gothic tales and absurdist farces and is interested in hyperdiction, anachronism, and the uncanny prerogatives of Sound and Art, including the political force of non-compliance in all its manifestations. With Johannes GA ransson, she founded the internationalist press Action Books and teaches at the MFA program at Notre Dame. She lives in South Bend, Indiana.