78 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020
In McSweeney’s work, ambient horror turns into devastating personal loss.
BOOKS
READING THE SIGNS
Joyelle McSweeney and the poetry of catastrophe.BYDAN CHIASSONILLUSTRATION BY ANJA SLIBART
he American poet Joyelle McSwee
ney’s new book, “Toxicon and
Arachne,” is actually two books, bound
as one and yoked together by disaster.
In “Toxicon,” written while carrying
her third child, McSweeney imagines
her body as a poisonous, dangerous
host, a “nest of scum” or a “jet engine”
with a “stork torso” caught inside it.
The world that awaits the child is
equally, extravagantly lethal: “factory
hens” carry “their viral load” while the
“zika mosquito” dips its “improbable
proboscis/ into the human layer/ and
vomits an inky toxin.” The poems are
written in a frightening, crusty im
pasto, the hard “T” and “x” and “c” of
the title mutating from one phrase to
another. “Arachne,” the sequel, is named
for the child, “8 pounds, black hair, and
a heart shoved aside by its guts,” who
died tragically after her “odd alloca
tion of thirteen days.” McSweeney fears
that she will “hemorrhage rage,” then
“lie down where all the hemorrhages
start. & cremate the house & collapse
on the street.” “Toxicon” is poetry
dragged into the pit of a nightmare;
“Arachne” is its unbearable, almost un
thinkable, coda.
McSweeney, who teaches at the Uni
versity of Notre Dame, has published
three previous books of poetry, plus
novels, stories, verse plays, and a critical text that helps define her own prac
tice, “The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media,
Occults.” In necropastoral space, she
has written, nature is “poisoned, mu
tated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill
effects and affects.” The words of the
living commingle sickeningly with those
of the dead. All poets write in language
exhumed in part from their ancestors;
in McSweeney’s work, prior language
takes hold of a poem by seepage or
contamination, in the stealthy way that
“bugs, viruses, weeds and mold” do,
going about their relentless work. As
occult ideas about poetry go, McSwee
ney’s is surprisingly grounded: poetry
isn’t a séance, as it was for Yeats or James
Merrill; it’s a biohazard, teeming with
linguistic contagion.
The power of McSweeney’s work
cannot be separated from its associa
tion with forms of oracle and sooth
saying, and so it is uncanny that it should
arrive in the middle of a global pan
demic. Her style is created by loosing
outbreaks of sound, and then contain
ing them on the page. “Toxic Sonnets:
A Crown for John Keats” is a cascade
of fourteen fourteenline poems, set in
motion when McSweeney reads about
“the tubercle” that killed Keats on a
screen whose glow “wrap[s] the motel
room in light.” A “crown” of sonnets—
an old form, now again in vogue—is
a kind of regulated excess: the last line
of each poem spills over and often be
comes the first line of the next. It’s the
perfect form to suggest a spiralling,
obsessive Internet rabbit hole, and its
final section is a scary tour de force of
open tabs. In the face of death, “life
converts its currency”:dollar bill: killfloor: T-cell: chemical spill:
gyre: fire bred to sink its tooth in bone and
breed
its own accelerant: rude, encamera’d
predator drone: thousand-pleated lace rill
at the throat: rouge to make the corpse look
flush
with cash or lust: best guest: grave
communicant: data drill or bank or dump:
plastic
asp that guides the chemo to the lump:“Relations stop nowhere,” Henry
James wrote; but McSweeney’s four
teenline boxes organize them, as do
her unsettling rhymes and manic puns.
The line breaks create both recursive
and propulsive meanings: “breed,” a