My roundup of recommended poetry books for April: Victoria Chang, Daniel Khalastchi, Sylvia Legris, Joyelle McSweeney, Emilia Phillips, Corey Van Landingham, and C. K. Williams. Here is my review of McSweeney’s Death Styles:
If to style—from stilus, a stake or pale, pointed instrument for writing (OED)—is to impale a thought with one’s pen, Joyelle McSweeney’s new book styles the aftermath of an infant daughter’s death as anguished, living consciousness pinned and vivisected, still squirming, onto the pages of an outré thought diary: “a periphery perforated by / absurdity and calamity / like funeral games performed for a slain infant,” she says, alluding to Euripides.
Accepting whatever inspiration presents itself to her “as an artifact of the present tense”—River Phoenix, Medea, the new Perry Mason, a skunk—she evokes what it means to “live in that / microregime which / pulls the watchface / all around itself.” “[T]he watchface is blank,” she warns, “the style / points exactly to itself.”
This mode of mirrored consciousness, from Bernadette Mayer to Emily Dickinson to the fragments of the pre-Socratics, depends on the self being pointed to, its artful intensities, the pointedness of any longueurs. In Death Styles,style may be, like the progression of a life, something narrow and transitory, what Schopenhauer termed “the physiognomy of the mind,” the flickers of an expressive face suggesting a vaster interiority: the permanent tear in a surviving mother’s eye (“from minima to minima / the ain’t of you”), the morbid yet healing grin (a pun on croque monsieur, croaking, and the smashed egg of a new life), the frail gaze ahead: “lucid, illicit / dust rides a motebeam / down to nothing where nothing / lifts its white sheet / to catch the image like a baby soon.”
(From book cover art for Sylvia Legris’ The Principle of Rapid Peering, New Directions Publishing, via Literary Hub.)