Dan Chiasson Reviews Joyelle McSweeney's Grounded Toxicon and Arachne

Dan Chiasson reviews Joyelle McSweeney's new book, Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat, 2020), "actually two books, bound as one and yoked together by disaster." More, from the New Yorker:

...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 impasto, 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 allocation 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 unthinkable, coda.

McSweeney, who teaches at the University of Notre Dame, has published three previous books of poetry, plus novels, stories, verse plays, and a critical text that helps define her own practice, “The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults.” In necropastoral space, she has written, nature is “poisoned, mutated, 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, McSweeney’s is surprisingly grounded...

Find all of Chiasson's review here.