Joyelle McSweeney, _Death Styles_

 THIS BOOK CAME out of a deeply painful circumstance: a daughter born with a fatal medical condition that led to her death after just thirteen days. 

McSweeney chose an interesting set of constraints for these poems: to write every day, “to accept any inspiration presented to me,” and “to fully follow the flight of that inspiration for as far as it would take me.” Accordingly, each poem’s title is a date, with a subtitle indicating what inspiration chance presented, and some of them are several pages long.

As you might expect, McSweeney’s daughter’s death figures in the poems often: “Darling / I’m sorry you didn’t survive / reverse aubade / every time the sun rises / I want to crumple up / this whole heliocentric universe.” Her accepting the themes and images presented by chance adds an entirely unpredictable swirl to her grief, though, so the poems continually surprise. The krater (the bowl in which ancient Greeks mixed wine), the hooded merganser (a kind of of duck), Mary Magdalene, Leonard Cohen, Mary Shelley are among the dictated-by-chance elements that eerily blend, as if destined to, with McSweeney’s memories and grief.

This may be why the book feels more like actual grief than do books that focus more closely on the grief itself. Our losses occur in a world that does not pause for us—if we are lucky, some will afford us a little space and a little quiet, but meanwhile everything keeps inexorably rolling on. Even our own consciousness keeps inexorably rolling on. And McSweeney’s poems do have that headlong rush, that sense of onward movement pulling us along even when we feel emotionally paralyzed. And the onward movement may be the very thing we need. The “Death Styles” sequence concludes: “I refuse / to shut my eyes / because I was robbed / of something / by a god / and I’m going to/ to keep looking / till I find it.”

And a shout out to Nightboat Books and designer Kit Schluter for the beauty of this book as an object. Taller and narrower than most books, a bit like Atheneum volumes from the early 1970s, with a cover that looks like a woodcut or lino cut with subdued blue, green, red, and pink on a black background, the paper embossed or lightly textured somehow. The presentation of the poems blended seamlessly with the reading of them.