THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 13, 2020 noun when it’s part of the phrase “bone
and breed,” becomes a verb when it’s
stitched to the phrase “its own accel-
erant”; “flush,” which means either rich
or full of blood, can imply “cash or lust.”
Some poets strain for these effects.
McSweeney, inundated by them, uses
form to manage the flood. In “Bio Pic,”
a scroll of phrases seems generated by
unconscious associations, or by eerie
best-guess technologies like autocor-
rect and predictive text:delete the fun
-ction til it hangs on air
lazy as a fan
in erased placeThe poem suggests the lurching way
that we write now, sometimes in tune
with, and often in opposition to, what
our devices assume about us: “poten-
tate / pomegranate / palm or pomade /
handgrenade.” The alternatives seem
to pop up almost of their own irritat-
ing volition.
A writer of McSweeney’s intense
receptivity suffers the onslaught of her
style almost as a series of physical blows.
The violence, the catastrophe, the Tech-
nicolor hellscapes are nearly too much
to bear. “Toxicon” is babyproofing in
an apocalypse: the fact of McSweeney’s
pregnancy rings out from every lethal
detail. She is shaken by the thought of
snuff sites, crime-scene photographs,
and grim hospital tableaux. The mind
that cannot unhear the echo of “hand-
grenade” in “pomegranate” races ahead
to macabre visions of freak accidents,
as “when the teenager seizes in the
driveway, her hatchback /glides down
into traffic on its own.”“
A
rachne” begins with an omen:
training her eye to her daugh-
ters’ level, McSweeney sees that the
sidewalks are full of “kinetic sand” (a
vaguely radioactive-seeming substance
that was a brief fad toy) “in place of
smashed robin’s eggs.” The idiolect
that McSweeney perfected for all-over,
ambient horror must now zero in on
a loss so targeted and personal that it
feels, at times, like a sick prank. “Was
it for this,” she asks, echoing the same
question Wordsworth put to himself
in “The Prelude,” that “even the un-
ready man” has become “catastrophe’s
host”? A box of Dreft, the baby soap,becomes a portent of the child’s death.
(“What a name for a baby soap: dread
plus bereft.”) The passage that follows
is imaginative play of the darkest pos-
sible cast:
O rose O ruined map of clots do not
open your eyes for me now
when we are even now preparing you for
Dreft
preparing to take the tomb out
I mean the tube and
wheel you away in your
plastic bassinetI suspect that people who have lost
an infant will find in “Arachne” a world
of forensic detail they never thought
would make its way into poetry, and
some may wish it hadn’t. I can imag-
ine it only because McSweeney wrote
these poems, with their curdled, ruined
anti-joy, a sorrow too sudden and new
to be called by the name of grief. The
chemicals that created anticipation in
the brain for months still pool in the
aftermath of tragedy. The crib and the
“cheerful wallpaper,” the Dreft and the
diapers could all belong in the photo
cloud or Instagram feed of a happy par-
ent. Instead, here they are, in an elegy.
“Catastrophe what crowns me,”
McSweeney writes. “What makes me
survive.” The costs, though, are exor-
bitant. “I summon all mine vanity,” she
writes, employing the beautiful, archaic
English borrowed from the ghost pres-
ences that circulate throughout her
poems (Keats, Anne Bradstreet, Sir
Thomas Browne, and so many others):
and crash my plane
into the abandoned nursery
& break my brainstorm down
I mean my brainstem
starved of oxygen
eating itself
emitting its bleat
like a nameless weed
on the edge of the galaxy
fringing the galaxy’s cunt
in that wrecked roomThe kamikaze fantasy arises, like ev-
erything in this frightening and bril-
liant book, not from a pleasant “brain-
storm” but from the animal reflexes of
the “brainstem.” The defeat is total: a
rout, a blowout. Now that the tables
have been permanently turned, “the
popsong plays” on “the toy turntable”
in the nursery and also—you can hear
the faint pun—“in eternity.” PROMOTIONjixianshe
ng