1. In a LitHub essay numbered one through ten, titled, “Style As Survival: On Writing After Death,” Joyelle McSweeney addresses the conditions under which she wrote Death Styles (Nightboat Books, 2024), her most recent collection of poetry. Following the death of her infant daughter, Arachne, it is a self-imposed structure that revives her practice: “1) I had to write daily 2) I had to accept any inspiration that came to me, however unlikely and 3) I had to write until the inspiration was totally exhausted.” Less an explanation than a continuation of the collection’s mantic poems, McSweeney takes the opportunity to further credit her many muses, or “style icons.” These style icons include a skunk, Mary Magdalene, River Phoenix, and “a Mickey Mouse watch who stuffed his own gloved hands in his mouth.” McSweeney also states that her book’s title is borrowed from Ingeborg Bachmann, the post-war Austrian writer and philosopher. For McSweeney, it is Bachmann’s novel Malina—the first in her unfinished Death Styles trilogy—that signals it is time to write.
2. For the reader, it is the dedication before McSweeney’s first poem, “for my daughters,” that signals it is time to read.
3. Death Styles is composed of three sections: “Death Styles,” “Agony in the Garden,” and “Afterword.” The book contains twenty-six multipage poems, twenty-five of which are “Death Styles,” twenty-four of which are dated, and eighteen of which correspond to the year 2020. The vast majority of the poems are written in compact lines that cascade down the left margin like rain on a window, easy on the eyes. But a good reader will soon learn that the tableau beyond this window is a landscape of mourning—not the immediate shock of loss familiar to readers of McSweeney’s previous book, Toxicon and Arachne, but the ache of years overshadowed by a terrible absence. Just as it is difficult to differentiate between one day of mourning and the next, here it is difficult to differentiate between one poem and the next. Grief is the ultimate organizing principle here. Grief will have the final word.
4. On the page, one might mistake the lines for gentler than they are, but read aloud, McSweeney’s poetics and aesthetics turn toward terrifying tongue twisters, thrumming with a rhythm that never quite settles down. Instead, her syntax pushes to the edge of meaning and beyond, off the cliff of it altogether, into a phantasmagoria of sound. As when McSweeney writes,
I imitated the clown
who imitated the mouse
who lived in the clock
like it said in the song
I was right twice a day
marched out and struck
myself in the face
the rest of the time
I imitated the drain
I did the limited-edition
imitation drain
Ruled by slant rhyme and similarly slanted meter, the poems themselves sometimes slant toward unsettling Mother Goose rhymes. Images unravel into waves of sound—sounds soon separate from their words—and the words begin to bear down on the reader, blurring any lingering distinctions between a poet’s control and a mother’s surrender. This is no accident: in a collection that is entirely concerned with the strangers death makes of us—strangers to our worlds, strangers to ourselves—linguistic estrangement is its own style.
5. Within this breathless threnody, the pain is in the pauses. McSweeney writes, in a litany of apologies addressed to her lost daughter, “I was afraid it would get infected! Your little knee.” This syntax, though not atypical in another register, here forces an uncharacteristic interruption. In a poem almost entirely devoid of normal punctuation—a poem containing no other periods!—this three-word sentence forces the reader to pause rather than continue at breakneck pace. “Your little knee.” A sharp reminder that even the simplest of all punctuation marks can still hurt like a mother.
6. In Ingeborg Bachman’s Malina, the protagonist speaks of “apparent wind,” an authentic nautical term used to distinguish between the felt force of the wind experienced by a moving object and so-called “true wind.” For Bachmann, the apparent wind is used to represent the spectral trace that language and expression must bear following trauma. It follows that McSweeney’s own winds bear this trace.
7. McSweeney first invokes the wind with a biblical allusion,
look angel:
pass over, or don’t
i don’t care
i’ll just stand here on the threshold
feel the wind you bear in your ratwings
rinse my hair
Here the wind is a harbinger of an angel, though not necessarily the most benevolent one, who rinses the speaker’s hair with “the wind [the angel] bear[s] in [their] ratwings.” In this same poem, the wind is described as serpentine—perhaps an echo of the rebel angels who turned to serpents after the fall. From here the winds both apparent and true carry the collection forward, providing direction and momentum, as when McSweeney writes, “you could squint to make out an uppermost crack / where in wind could blow like light.”
But the most fascinating description of the wind howls through McSweeney’s afterword. She writes, “When the wind changed the weather, all the ailing trees ducked their heads and turned up pale leaves marked with black round fungus, like a cigarette burn in a palm.” What cannot be seen is still felt and what cannot be said is still witnessed, even if only by the trees.
8. Likewise, the poems in Death Styles center McSweeney’s own testimony throughout, rendering work so extremely subjective and visceral that it is simultaneously unrestrained and clinical in its approach. The poems declare, over and over again, that life will continue despite tragedy, painful as it may be. And so, it is in the wake of tragedy that one must rely on style—not as mere indulgence but genuine necessity. Here, form and content collide, two rivers that run to the same “daughter-welcoming sea.”
9. This marriage of aspects is what gives the work a momentum all its own, a propulsion that reaches its climax in the penultimate poem, the only “Death Style” without a timestamp, instead titled “Conclusive Death Style: A Katabasis for River Phoenix.” Where another work of literature might move toward a lesson, McSweeney’s poems refuse to translate her experience into anything linear. Or, as McSweeney writes in her essay “Style as Survival,” “For ‘conclusive,’ read ‘convulsive.’ Read, ‘convolvulus.’ Lie down in the river. Dip your sieve in the river. Dip your kid there, by his ankle. Try again.”
Okay, let’s try again.
10. So we return again to the beginning, before the acknowledgements page and before River Phoenix, toward dawn—not the first one, nor the last—before McSweeney writes of “the daughter-welcoming sea,” and before she writes about the Lady of Shalott, who “glances at the dumb world in her mirror / and then decides to drown in it,” before the poet’s invocations of Medea and Mary Shelley, before McSweeney writes “I / order every living thing down / on its knees / to scumble in the mud / for pomegranate seeds,” before the “face of anger” and the color green, before the raw sewage that “runs down to Coney Island Creek. . . .” So we return again to the first poem in Death Styles, a poem in which we are told,
Everything is laced together
& nothing drains away,
nothing drains away.
But does it have to be this beautiful.
It is an unflinching eye that captures terrible beauty and beautiful terror in equal measure. But in McSweeney’s poetry, this dialectic is undeniable—it is why she does not use a question mark after “beautiful.” Because yes, it does have to be beautiful. Because this is how the light gets in. Because reading Death Styles makes me feel just as Emily Dickinson says I ought to feel: “as if the top of my head were taken off.”
