Joyelle McSweeney
Joyelle McSweeney’s wildly imaginative, rageful poems turn decay into sustenance and go on defying death by thriving on rot.
Joyelle McSweeney was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her masterful use of language is on full display in Death Styles (2024), the latest of her five books of poetry. In this singular study of grief, McSweeney holds an embodied tension between trauma, which ruminates upon the past, and forward-looking survival. Inspired by the dictum “let beauty be convulsive or not all,” her verse, simple upon first exposure, accumulates a terrifying momentum when read aloud. With influences ranging from ancient Greek poetry to the post-industrial Rust Belt where she has long resided, McSweeney’s originality lies in the way she blends notions of what it might mean for a poet to become a prophetess while also viewing the world from “very low down.” While McSweeney is adept at confronting devastating memories, she also infuses her work with the possibility of transmuting pain into prayer. This personal exploration can be traced back to Toxicon and Arachne (2020), a meditation on an eight-year cycle of loss on both the individual and global scale. Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry (2022) among other honors, McSweeney is also co-founder and co-editor of Action Books. She is currently Chair of the English Department and the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
Sitting at my kitchen table among piles of Legos, stickers, half-made Valentines, and sticky books of Surrealist women's poetry in translation, I find myself suddenly electrified, as if the Universe had lowered her star-cloak and looked me dead in the eye. I now wear an eel for a stole, an eel I stole from Heaven. I feel transformed, elated, and charged with a very large charge.