Joyelle McSweeney's Pandemic Prophecies

At the Yale Review, Joyelle McSweeney writes about her latest collection of poetry, Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, April 2020), and about discovering her own prophetic inclinations. "The book I delivered in the midst of this pandemic is thick and riven with biological catastrophes, supersaturated with viruses, gestations and mutations, police violence, ill-starred births and abundant, microbial growth: portent upon portent, star upon star," writes McSweeney. Further:

Though I had thought I was writing about my own pet topics and personal calamities, I was really attending, as a poet does, to a world rife with pain, contamination, and depredation. My poems stored these toxins in their soft tissues, harm stippling the catgut with which each sonnet is stitched. When those same chains of oppression and contagion erupted in a global pandemic and national catastrophe, my book itself seemed to erupt, retrospectively, in uncanny prophetic blooms.

When books of prophecy are opened, we discover what we knew all along.

This is also true of coronavirus itself. When the black boxes of the death tallies were first opened and the disproportionate effects of the virus on Black, brown, and native people and communities were first brought to light, the results were a punch in the gut—breathtaking, dismaying, shocking—and then not shocking at all.

Continue reading at Yale Review.