Death Styles

Named one of Lit Hub's "Most Anticipated Books of 2024" 

"After McSweeney's infant daughter died, she found herself unable to write for two years. She made her way back via the torrent of poems in this collection; the result is like a volcano, spewing details of pop culture and regular life amid waves of grief and perseverance." —The New York Times Book Review

"Whether keening or mundane, hysterical or technical, these pages follow the mind’s motion with associative detours. . . [A] poignant and unforgettable portrait of grief." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"McSweeney captures how trauma bleeds through everything. . . anguish wells out of her poems as she works to "reconcile grief's desire to look backward with survival's command to move forward." —Vikas Turakhia, Star Tribune

"In Death Styles, Joyelle McSweeney summons for contemporary poetry the poetic force and historical reckoning of the baroque. Her mantic ear reminds us that the baroque is not an aesthetic of bewilderment so much as it is a reckoning with those conditions of lost authority, endangered offerings, the sovereignty of exception, and the debts of death that bewilder our searches for the ancient dawn. This work of daily midwestern catoptromancy by a poet who sees with her ears her incident irradiance is as brilliantly brutal as history itself."—Edgar Garcia

"One is a mother, able to show the reality of the world without sugarcoating it. One learns to decipher the path toward that destination with her daughters’ minds in tow. One migrates among circumstances, studying the position of the sun, the Milky Way, and the social pressures, compounded by everyday violence, that will overcome our daughters. It’s neither a coincidence nor a simple, respectable manifestation of love that Death Styles, by Joyelle McSweeney, is dedicated to her daughters. It’s difficult to observe oneself and the irremediable social absurdity that one is supposed to represent through motherly love. The obviousness of (supposed) womanhood, the death of creativity intertwined with privilege, the suffering of ordinary life, its responsibilities, the guilt of living in a gilded cage, or the cage of motherhood: all these themes traverse the poetics of Joyelle McSweeney and forge, together, a terrifying, beautiful, utterly singular book."—Dolores Dorantes, translated by Robin Myers