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Jun 20, 2024 | 
yalereview.org | Joyelle McSweeney
How did this poem begin for you? This poem follows the demented snaky military snare that rolls under and through Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games” and her other slow-burning torch songs. What kind of battle are we being called to? Where is St. Lizzie of Lake Placid leading us? What her banner, her cause? It reminds me of growing up near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, all the revolutionary iconography of drums and head injuries, badly painted middle school murals of my toxic adolescence. . . .
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May 2, 2024 | 
bombmagazine.org | Joyelle McSweeney
“Because I’m a poet, I believe in magic words,” Joyelle McSweeney told me. I’ve shadowed her work, Sophie Calle style, since falling hard for the alchemy of The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. Her new book of poetry, Death Styles (Nightboat Books) chronicles the daily bewilderments and accidental concessions of hope that followed the death of her infant daughter, Arachne.
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Apr 29, 2024 | 
theparisreview.org | Joyelle McSweeney
By Joyelle McSweeney April 29, 2024 In the new Spring issue of The Paris Review, we published an Art of Poetry interview with Alice Notley, conducted by Hannah Zeavin. To mark the occasion, we commissioned a series of short essays that analyze Notley’s works. We hope readers will enjoy discovering, or rediscovering, these lectures, essays, and poems.
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Apr 19, 2024 | 
texarkanagazette.com | Marie Howe |Joyelle McSweeney |Vikas Turakhia
New and Selected PoemsBy Marie Howe; Norton (192 pages, $28.99)Death StylesBy Joyelle McSweeney; Nightboat (136 pages, $17.95)You Are HereEdited by Ada Limón; Milkweed (128 pages, $25)Three new collections, one haunting, one cathartic and one reflective, remind us why we celebrate National Poetry Month. In "New and Selected Poems," Marie Howe collects 20 new works and 91 older ones, sampling 30 years of her acutely observant verse.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
arcamax.com | Marie Howe |Joyelle McSweeney
Three new collections, one haunting, one cathartic and one reflective, remind us why we celebrate National Poetry Month. In "New and Selected Poems," Marie Howe collects 20 new works and 91 older ones, sampling 30 years of her acutely observant verse. Where earlier poems contend with gender expectations, childhood abuse and the weight of unspeakable grief, Howe's new work contemplates how age affects her interactions with the world.
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
startribune.com | Marie Howe |Joyelle McSweeney
Three new collections, one haunting, one cathartic and one reflective, remind us why we celebrate National Poetry Month. In "New and Selected Poems," Marie Howe collects 20 new works and 91 older ones, sampling 30 years of her acutely observant verse. Where earlier poems contend with gender expectations, childhood abuse and the weight of unspeakable grief, Howe's new work contemplates how age affects her interactions with the world.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Joyelle McSweeney |Chiara Marchelli |Carol Sansour
Did the butterfly illuminate youwhen it burned with the eternal light of the rose? –Mahmoud Darwish, “Now When you Awaken, Remember,”The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady JoudahWhat comes after the end of the world? This question is continuously on my mind as I read the work of the ancients and my contemporaries, from Kim Hyesoon and Raúl Zurita to Antonin Artaud, Euripides, and Azo Vauguy—and I read them all in translation.
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Mar 25, 2024 | 
lithub.com | Joyelle McSweeney
“After the combat of eagles comes the combat of octopuses […] The hideous flower, the outlined flower, revolves its black petals in the mad flesh of the sun. Where is the source? Where the remedy? When will the economy finally change its ways?”–René Char writing under his Resistance codename, Hypnos*“Why not understand life for what it is? Why not force life to understand itself?”–Amelia Rosselli, Obtuse Diary*1. After the baby died, it was not the case that I could not write. 2.
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Feb 15, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Tayi Tibble |Kwame Alexander |Hala Alyan |Joyelle McSweeney
Māori poet Tibble (Poukahangatus) meditates on the turbulence of youth and the spiritual guidance of her ancestors in her sagacious and impishly outspoken second collection. These poems engage with overt and overlooked subjugation, the weight of expectation, and the quest for self-containment in piquant, virtuosic stream of consciousness fused with ripe sensuality and robust lyricism.
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Dec 17, 2023 | 
poetryfoundation.org | Joyelle McSweeney
About this Poet Joyelle McSweeney's collections of poetry include The Red Bird (2002), winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poetry Series, The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004), Percussion Grenade (2012), and Toxicon and Arachne (2020), a finalist for the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Award.She is also the author of the novels Nyland, the Sarcographer (2007) and Flet (2007); the...
