May 14th: Joyelle McSweeney—Death Styles

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Joyelle McSweeney in Conversation with Terrence Arjoon to discuss her book Death Styles (Nightboat, 2024)

This event will take place live at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd avenue, on Tuesday, May 14th at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. The discussion will be streamed directly on this page. A recording will be archived.

Joyelle McSweeney—Death Styles (Published by Nightboat Books, 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.

Joyelle McSweeney, a recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, published works span poetry, prose, drama, translation, and criticism. Her debut volume The Red Bird (2001) inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series; her verse play Dead Youth, or the Leaks (2012) inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights; and her most recent double-collection, her co-translation with Jack Jung, Don Mee Choi, and Sawako Nakayasu of Yi Sang: Selected Works received numerous recognitions, including the 2021 MLA  Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. Her influential volume The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) counters conventional ecopoetics by locating aesthetic and political possibility in such signature Anthropocene phenomena as mutation, contagion, contamination, and decay. McSweeney is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Photo By Nat Ward

Terrence Arjoon is a poet, editor, and critic whose work has appeared in Tagvverk, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and Smooth Friend, among other publications. His chapbook Acid Splash, or Into Blue Caves was published by 1080PRESS where he is an editor. His first book El Desdichado is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.