Jess Liu
Death Styles, by Joyelle McSweeney. Nightboat Books, 2024, 136pp., $17.95.
When spun, the zoetrope — a relic of pre-film entertainment — produces illusory movement. Peering through the slits in its cylindrical walls, the viewer sees a series of images blur into motion. But friction will slow this movement, revealing the gaps that splice the sequence. In structure, Death Styles is Joyelle McSweeney’s zoetrope. The collection reads in chronological order: each poem is titled the date it was written. This sets mourning on a path of linear progression. Yet the illusion stutters — the past resurges. Death Styles reveals how grief swallows the present tense in its black eye, then regurgitates it in spectral forms.
After the death of her baby, who lived thirteen days in the NICU, McSweeney gave herself three rules. She names these in her afterword: “First, I had to write daily. Second, I had to accept any inspiration presented to me as an artifact of the present tense… Third, I had to fully follow the flight of that inspiration.” These rules produced the poems of Death Styles. Each devours the matter of the present, then churns it into an associative mulch. In one poem, a movie scene with River Phoenix replays; McSweeney draws from Terminator 2 and TikTok just as much as she does anachronistic diction and mythology.
There is a dissonant motion at the heart of Death Styles. Survival demands a procession forward. Grief, however, has its own repetitive appetites. Images pour through one poem and drain into the next: defunct clocks, spectral cats, the color green. While the poems consume the present, they also recirculate the past. Absence is constitutive; the poems contain both body and cavity.
McSweeney probes this porous seam between absence and presence. Her lines cascade down the page, scaffolded by free verse and few stanza breaks. The tightroping profile of her poems on the page mimics how grief turns linear time into a flipping or balancing act. “8.11.20 - A Skunk” figures a skunk the speaker encounters on her walk as both “gnomon and antonym,” marker of time and oppositional to it. This snarling of projection and shadow is mimicked in the speaker’s pivots of language and image. With a phrasal flip — “where were we” — the speaker transports us from hospital room to baseball field. We are left stranded, numb. “Everything is laced together / & nothing drains away / nothing drains away,” McSweeney writes. Even as it articulates preservation, the phrase drains. The attempt to slip away reflects an ambivalence toward the circulation she describes.
Death Styles itself is a drain where waste catches. Just as a dog’s “novel” is “some other creature’s mark or waste,” as she writes in “8.11.20 - A Skunk,” the collection of poems is formed from McSweeney’s loss. Sound and image make up the collection’s defunct currency. In one poem, we follow a coin down the drain. It pops back up and erupts with three sides in another. Yet another figures the speaker’s dead child as both coin faces. Like the coin, loss cannot be fully eviscerated. Undigested memory mutates into the present and appropriates its limbs.
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Arachne, McSweeney’s lost daughter, was born unable to breathe. In The Yale Review, McSweeney recounts how spring, with all “its wealth, its wetness,” had the nerve to arrive. She had written one poetry collection, Toxicon, before Arachne’s birth. Yet her anger at Arachne’s death spurred her to write a second part. It attached to the first to create a combined collection, and Toxicon & Arachne was born.
At the end of this process, McSweeney put down her pen for two years. Yet Death Styles marks the recognition that, as she puts it in an interview with BOMB, “survival demands we move forward in time. That’s where Toxicon and Arachne ends and Death Styles begins.” Indeed, while Death Styles is populated with small elegies for Arachne, McSweeney writes in her afterword that Death Styles “is for my living children.”
Survival is a garment we wear. It is a style we weave from whatever is at hand — a gesture, frivolous or mundane, a way of moving in the world. In death’s aftermath, what can we do but draw our morning robes closer and bring the kids to school? The motions of living on seem ridiculous, reminders of the losses we can’t reclaim.
The collection’s title reflects survival’s contradictions, suturing together two terms which seem disparate. Death is serious. It is inevitable, irreversible. Its consequence is a life that can only be lived in its wake. Style, instead, is ornament. It’s anything deemed as excess — a way of writing, the garments one wears. Such is McSweeney’s argument: in the face of death, with all its absurd weight, style is how we live on.
Yet McSweeney does not weigh style to the same solemnity as death. In “8.17.20 - Leonard Cohen, Clytemnestra,” the speaker sits in the backyard, strung between everyday responsibilities and the nearly mythological weight of her grief. References to Greek antiquity spill into her observations. The narration, as a result, becomes absurd. Here, the speaker “tote[s] around” a “parody Elysium.” Where one might give into melodrama, an elevated sense of their own suffering, the speaker’s loss does not grant her access to any heroic afterlife. Stuck on Earth, she can only render her mortal life as an accessory, mocking the self-aggrandizing valence people assign to death. After all, “If you are going to wear a crown” — after someone you love dies — “it should be made of something / ridiculous, that bobs.” Because death has no logic, absurdity is the only garment we can wear to face it.
If survival is a style, the past clings to the garments we wear to live on. In “8.25.20 - Hospital Planters,” the speaker apologizes to her child for never taking them to see the planters atop the hospital. These planters turn ghostly, “pale concrete things crowned with improbably fragrant grass.” Their aroma cuts across time:
we petted them, brushed against them like cats
so the scent stuck around in our fur
and emanated a third cat
Scent, like grief, lingers. Fur is the medium for grief’s spectral multiplication. It forms the juncture between the speaker and her dead baby, allowing them to interface.
McSweeney weaves disparate strands of time, space, logic, into a series of outrageous garments which face and compound the absurdity of death. She is concerned with when and where the past erupts into the present. In this poem, texture becomes the threshold between past and present. Wherever it returns, the past has no logic — it congeals in the present, disarming and unexpected.
Death Styles offers no clear entry into or passage through grief. Instead, grief metastasizes within the speaker. In “8.17.20 - Leonard Cohen, Clytemnestra,” McSweeney figures how loss distorts interior and exterior. The speaker imagines herself away from her backyard to the island of Hydra, where Leonard and his lover, Marianne, swim. The sea deepens. In its depths, she meets her child. Underneath the water, the speaker’s ambivalence toward her own survival is figured as an image of the seam — a site of both depth and wounded surface.
Bird-eye ticks at the bottom of the well
and won’t give back even light
it wants to blink
wants to rub its own eye
and go to sleep
in the seam of itself
I want something pulled out of me
like a maiden witched back up out of the well
or maybe I want
to sit and blink at the bottom of it
let the heir tumble into me
live forever there
dead and romantic
The eye becomes self-reflexive, refusing to yield coherent subjects. “I” and “eye” are confused. Both are opaque, both desire sleep, and both refuse to reproduce: not an “heir,” not an image. The speaker could “become a holy well / in the holy see.” Yet the thought that she could settle into her grief is false. Multiple layers of meaning flex over each other: “sea” twists into “see,” watery depth and rhetorical marker entangle, and “see” turns from verb into gangly noun. In these confusions, McSweeney figures the poem as a zone of uncertain depth.
This zone can be interpreted as the posthumous — what continues to move beyond death. Things swim in and out of focus. Scale is perforated, detritus blurs the lens. In the depths of this murky sea, the speaker and their dead child encounter each other:
I take this lesson to heart
when I imagine we meet at the bottom of the sea
and you are something pollen-like and flourishing in the nitrogen seams
And I grub around with comically distended jaws
Unable to meet in the realm of the human, speaker and child morph into something inhuman. The speaker is a sea creature with ungainly jaws. Lacking hands to hold her child, she grubs around in the sand. Likewise, her child becomes “something pollen-like,” blurred through death’s watery veil, and is “flourishing in the nitrogen seams.” Like detritus, the decomposed matter of organisms which contains nitrogen — the speaker’s child divides endlessly into particles. This realm of the posthumous promises continued activity beyond life and through the grave.
Yet the speaker is unable to consume all this matter — to more than briefly encounter her child’s many afterlives.
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On Tin House’s “Between the Covers” podcast, McSweeney recounts how her loss of hearing in her late 20s shaped her poetic practice. As she sat in dark rooms for hearing tests, trying to sort out whether a noise was present or absent, she became aware of sound as an “event” shaped by “gaps and delays, mistakes, echoes, and earworms.”
McSweeney uses hearing aids. They turn sounds into words at a delay, an effect which shapes her interest in sound as a temporal force. While we might not be aware of this chasm between a sound we hear and its source, it is built into everything we hear. The sound we receive forever arrives too late. In the brief time it takes for us to register any sound, what have we already lost? McSweeney writes into this interval.
If sound is the “terrain” of Death Styles, as McSweeney claims in the interview, it forms less of a stable ground than a fecund topography. While no one answers the speaker’s wish for someone to tell her how to carry on (“to shout instructions from the sky”) in “8.14.20 - River Phoenix”, she isn’t met with silence. Instead, sound proliferates: homophonic puns, repeated words, poly- and mono-syllables frothing together. McSweeney pushes words to their referential limit. They mutate into sonic material that accrues and teems.
McSweeney’s prosodic excess is a form of simultaneous production and waste — similar to the act of living on. In “8.11.20 - A Skunk,” a skunk’s face morphs into a handless watch where “no time passes,” mirroring the speaker’s desire to follow their child into an atemporal “tomb.” But staying here requires going “anaerobic,” an untenable state: “our mortal bloodstreams / flood with waste,” and “we’re forced to take a breath.” We cannot follow the dead into their tomb. Instead, we must wade in what remains after they are gone: the present.
Just as breath makes carbon dioxide, a waste-gas that both originates from and transforms our bodily matter, grief mutates beyond its original event. The past cannot be completely expelled from earth; it recirculates and moves through us. Indeed, reading these poems feels like drifting somewhere outside of linear time. The speaker moves, stranded, through the present with the feeling that she is too late — to protect her living children from disaster, to save or follow her dead child.
Yet we must keep breathing in this detritus. In “10.19.20 - A Decaying Leaf,” McSweeney reaches a turning point: she refuses to wait for the gods to make meaning from her loss. “Lift each instrument / smash it up,” she declares. McSweeney pieces this wreckage into a new style of survival. She reinvents trash into mock-holy idols: “discontinued / vacuum-cleaner bags” become “surplus saints” which “scoff the scoff of the defunct,” embracing their own role as waste.
At this point, McSweeney does not seek consolation. If loss renders the present a land of waste, she does not dramatize. Instead, her poems embrace and refashion what seems inconsequential, defunct. Seeing a hooded merganser swim, listening to live music in a gazebo, watching Terminator 2 — each mundane act is its own style of survival.
After Arachne’s death, McSweeney received a medical bill for $27,000 — the cost of airlifting Arachne to the NICU. On X, she writes that her Medivac claim was denied: it “failed to show medical necessity.” Yet in a reply, she writes: “Ironically I loved getting these absurd bills, because I had so few things with her name on it.” She figures these bills, which someone else might stuff in a trash can, as almost beloved — papers which testify to Arachne’s brief existence; papers which, however absurd, cannot compare to Arachne’s loss.
Her last reply in the thread: “Arachne Artemisia McSweeney-Göransson. 9/29/17-10/11/17. ‘Love, Love, my season.’”
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In an interview with Nightboat Press, McSweeney cites Ingeborg Bachmann’s unfinished trilogy, “Todesarten” — which roughly translates to “Death Styles” — as the source of her collection’s title. In Bachmann’s Malina (1971), her protagonist writes the phrase Death Styles on a scrap of paper. Bachmann figures post-war Austria as its own realm of decay: left in the ruins of fascism, exiled from historical progress. Here, one must repeatedly encounter the past in words: “Language must encompass all things and in it all things must again transpire.”
In Death Styles, too, we must face the specters of loss again and again. The past’s resurgence can feel crushing amid the demands of linear time. Yet the collection rebels. It refuses to face death with passivity, to wait for loss to become coherent. In doing so, McSweeney offers a way for us to face and live with our ghosts.
The collection ends with McSweeney’s elegy for her child, “Agony in the Garden,” built from a Tweet by @combinedsewer, an account which tracks NYC’s sewage overflows. The Tweet reads: “Raw sewage runs down to Coney Island Creek.” Here the past and present circle down the drain together, here lies McSweeney's point. When death brings us to the ground, we can only weave new styles of survival from the detritus we find down there.
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Photo by Patricia Voulgairs