Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles does what poems ought to do—attempt to give us experience, the derivative of event, the lines that represent acceleration in describing the actual speedometer markings. It’s the job of a poet to pull us out through experience and leave narratives and events and data points to other genres.
McSweeney’s book is made of a daily writing practice (covering roughly from early August 2020 into May of 2021), an attempt to get out of that space of being unable to write by writing all things, while grieving the loss of a newborn child. At times verging into memoir, while also experimenting with the ways narrative forms out of trauma, Death Styles seeks to capture the daybook’s material existence, what the jacket copy notes is an exhaustive gesture to link “style and survival” through practice, through repetition and the physical act of doing. McSweeney’s desire in these pages is to claw back out of death’s style and back into the style of the living: the lyric. In an interview with Dante Silva of Nightboat, McSweeney notes that exhaustion was key—doing until it could be done no longer, a mantra of exercise. The weight should feel like nothing before moving up to the next level. This is in itself style, Silva points out, and is ultimately tied to survival, another exhaustive, repetitive practice itself until one can move to the next unbearable limit.
The style itself—the shape and forms of poems, feels insistent. Sentences often run together with no clear direction. I read these at times as the mind running itself together, attempting to keep up with the tasks of living while unable to focus through grief. It feels naturalistic in a way that seems . . . anti-stylized, no doubt a contrast between the new work and McSweeney’s oeuvre thus far (especially in her previous book, Toxican and Arachne). Death is a style, no doubt, but one without adornment at times. The poems here can feel wonderfully plain—in a positive way—the daybook premise, with dates and subtitles, showing a writing practice reemerging from grief. The lines that run too long show us that we’re really dealing with many separate lines, little breaks in thought and focus. This method of writing demonstrates a kind of acceptance of the nature of the work, one not wrapped up in a kind of Calvino-esque lightness, but rather ensconced in its burden of grief.
However, even in the heaviness of the theme, there is still a poet playing with malleability into twists that might catch the tongue and eyes in a complacent moment. This clever playfulness emerges immediately and returns in flashes as we progress through the work, but even in the first poem we hear McSweeney’s familiar voice. “Gorgeous” is a word she draws out and lingers with in the fourth line. A few pages later:
I mouth the dialogue
I put my thumb in my mouth to mime the drinking
I will do at five o’clock
on the dot
at the spot
in the center of the clock
face, watch face, sundial, style.
For poems (or perhaps ought we say “entries”?) that feel blank in their versiness, to have a moment with rhythms and slant rhymes appears a return to the familiar. The ascent then, as the dates progress, is not the unraveling of a mind in grief, but rather one that comes to terms with it and returns, begrudgingly it feels, to the lyric itself. By 11.23.20, we can almost see the smile on McSweeney’s face at the fun of rhyming snow and gazebo, like tentative steps back into watching time’s new progression. But what is clever here is also the opposition, the winter’s onset versus summer and gazebos and a band playing out. Summer prefigured the trauma at the book’s heart. We know summer’s end too well, but the months before feel lost in a book that didn’t get written. The descent is into a new normalcy, a new period in which things do not return to “fine,” but to a new “fine” defined in forms of routine, in appearing to live without grief. As McSweeney writes on page 93, “I wanted to write about Sound / without hearing / noise / -less heart-throb.”
The poems in Death Styles make use of media—of films, tv, novels. Of River Phoenix and Perry Mason. Of Mary Shelley in her own grief. This may feel familiar from the years of the pandemic and its aftermath. Beyond merely making someone a homebody, the styles of death at times appear as styles of escape, but by page 31 (“A Lie Detector for Matthew Rhys”), we find that escaping from one’s grief means accepting new styles of life:
Now it is time to
learn a new alphabet
Not drinking is for pregnant women
you’re not pregnant
just a little green
so drink up, baby
There’s a realization here—that how one has been planning to define one’s self has not come to be. Matthew Rhys plays Perry Mason in the rebooted series of the same name—a famous fictional defender of the wrongly accused who has a knack for drawing the truth out in the last moments, epiphanies of how the world of the episode is constructed.
And here we have a truth—or a series of truths. “I’m hiding,” McSweeney writes, “in the tiny yard because I’m thronged with people, laundry, dishes, subfunctional computer equipment, weeds, animals, mold, and a virus wrapped around the planet like a tumor wrapped in veins.” Here we see the distinction of event from experience—the moment where McSweeney can tell us how she’s feeling (I immediately understand what hiding means when directly told), but it is not until the two strophes later that we are given the derivative:
In the theater of my brain I run the blockbuster. You’re a professor, archeologist, and detective, a bad mentor. In the opening scenes you teach inside a rolltop desk. I see myself in you when your hair is disarranged to indicate disbelief and incomprehension, something rolling from the sky. Comprehension arrives like a boulder, train, snake, soda siphon, lady in diaphanous dress or wrapped in cellophane, secondary racist caricature. Even a child has to make his face plain for you to read it.
These images are of the unfigured and unpresentable. McSweeney can tell us as much as she might want of the experience, but there is no way to comprehend it, no way to be within it without metaphor, because language can only capture so much without the strokes of the brush across the canvas that show us the shaking hand. The boulder, train, et al., do not merely appear, don’t come from nowhere.
McSweeney’s tower is made of a practice—what we read is not made up of the events of the day like a diary might be, but rather the experience of living those days. A calendar can tell you what happened on a certain day, a grocery list can tell you what you need at the store, but in Death Styles, we receive what remains, how the simple act of buying milk can throw someone back into the grief they have been experiencing:
i decide to buy the milk later in the day
to clear time to write and now all i think about is milk
milk milk
i crawl all over the house looking for dirty bottlesrubber nipples and plastic collars
In the first half of the book, we do have event. The narrator tells us they are making a decision and providing a logic for that decision that anyone might agree with: to give themselves time to write. This is understandable, we can latch onto it, it makes sense to us. But then we are drawn into the realm of grief, the way the mind slips back into these spaces with simple triggers. This is a repeated move throughout Death Styles, a natural effect—a style itself of grief’s manifestation. Later, with Mary Shelley, we’re thrown overboard with her husband’s body—“The cavity of air where the sea is missing” marks the space of a body that has been submerged, lost. We’re also given other forms of terror—the chemo suite lunch, a catalog of adjectives that makes nouns appear like similar traumas are taking place all around.
The volta of Death Styles appears on, of all days, January 6, 2021. To me it seems impossible to still remain within the self without recognition of what was going on outside. While life has continued—combing hair and grieving—there seems a connection here between political chaos and personal trauma. There becomes a reemergence of awareness that
Something is failing here
on the organelle level
the two living children
the dead one the girl
who never knew the weather
Many of us were processing (or attempting to, at any rate) another trauma, standing near the television or with our phones in hand watching a very different kind of chaos play out, new fears (or perhaps more accurately, our fears coming to fruition) emerging. But our collective grief does not erase the smaller collective grief of a family attempting to reemerge from the deepest abyss. There are always terrors around us, even when we do not experience them firsthand. We owe it as readers and humans to give those traumas their own space. Disasters merely compound—they do not replace one another.
It is difficult not to attach meaning to reoccurrence throughout the work, the ideas and names that come back to us as we read forward. Sometimes, in Death Styles, the lost child rises again in the form of River Phoenix, the famed actor whose early death from a drug overdose cut short a career that had already accomplished much but promised so much more. Phoenix died with a number of films in the planning stages that would no doubt have made the 1990s the age of Phoenix and made him, already beloved, one of the most successful actors of his generation. There are, throughout the book, visions of the life unled, and Phoenix’s death and our ability to rewatch endlessly what he left behind is a forceful reminder at times of what we lose when a life is cut short. But the phoenix always rises from its own ashes.
The final “Death Style,” which begins with a “katabasis,” a march into the underworld, also features a retreat—a marching back up. A withdrawal. A regression. At the end, the tower comes calling, but the unlived life provides a kind of cathartic path forward here:
River I’m trying to see around you
to an idea of art
that’s both pit and tower
dick and uterus at once
inside the blood can splash, replenish
and shed all over again
There is, in the end, new life, not without grief, but perhaps on the far side of it. Learning to grieve here means also learning a new way of living, a rather literal lifestyle—and Death Styles, for all its invocations of death, is ultimately about life, relearning how to live it, how to refocus and reimagine what living looks like.
The work that comes out of that grief attempts to show us the experience of something truly terrifying, but utterly and comfortingly human as well. It’s what we ought to be doing to some extent: giving language to the unimagined moments of living and dying. We don’t want others to be trapped in our traumas, but rather to use the space of the work to process that trauma and understand our own grief—or perhaps better yet, to understand our own grief and process our own experiences. As Adorno writes in his chapter “Beethoven’s Late Style,” a late work is
said to break through the smooth surface of form in order to express itself; it turns harmony into the dissonant outpouring of suffering and scorns sensuous charm in favor of the autocratic gestures of the liberated spirit. This account forces late works to the margins of art and to its interface with personal document.
None of this is to suggest that Death Styles is, by any means, a “late” work for McSweeney, but rather we might consider that McSweeney herself might have thought of herself in a later period of her career when unable to write. How one returns to the lyric poem after tragedy is one of the book’s central questions. In a mature work from a poet, there is a sense of the “liberated spirit,” in that surely no one can be expected to give back to us in full their process and experience. We are not owed anything as friends or family or readers.
There is, then, a new life filling the gap in the sea where the body once took up space. “Agony in the Garden” is for McSweeney’s son, and is perhaps the most lyrical, non-daybook section of the book, which seems appropriate for the end. The final pages are filled with McSweeney’s playfulness, harkening back to the King Prion poems in Percussion Grenade—poems that feel sing-songy, perfect for delivery:
lucid, illicit
dust rides a motebeam
down to nothing where nothing
lifts its white sheet
to catch the image like a baby soon
dawn
Read this aloud. Hear the vowel sounds and alliteration as they pour from you. Since much of McSweeney’s trajectory as poet has been a move toward performance, I am moved deeply that I can hear her singing these lines to me. There is once again a kind of joy in these pages, mixed with the grotesque image of raw sewage (the poem and its subtitle here refer to a tweet by NYC Combined Sewers). We can’t ever completely leave behind the awfulness of the world, but we start to see joy again.
In the end, we come to a moment for McSweeney and for ourselves: “now release her,” she writes, “cartwheeling across the sky.” Grief does not end, but rather we learn to smile again, learn to take a deep breath without it catching in our chests. We catch ourselves experiencing a happy memory rather than the memory of the event reliving itself within us repeatedly. We learn to trust our senses again and believe that they are our own, even if all the rest were ours to begin with, surfacing from depths, unknown spaces. And we too, as readers, and mentees, learn how to carry ourselves by witnessing how others process these moments as they collide with one another.
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Death Styles. By Joyelle McSweeney. New York: Nightboat Books, 2024. 136pp. $17.95.
