Death Styles

The poems are wet with reality—with presence. . . endless.

The lyric poems in this collection explore the tension between surviving loss and the overwhelming resistance to hold on to it. . . [Death Styles] offers grief a vessel, transmuting it from hopeless haunting into fecund—and mortal—form.

This is a gut-wrenching and tender and bleak account of the impossible depths of grief. Highly recommended for when you find yourself in your I can’t go on/I’ll go on era, in the surreal and desperate hours of late capitalism.

Whether keening or mundane, hysterical or technical, these pages follow the mind’s motion with associative detours. . . [A] poignant and unforgettable portrait of grief.

The layerings of grief are punctuated by and through the repetitions, the incredible openness and indirect directness of her lyric, how she doesn’t shy away from grief, while simultaneously attending to the requirements of her day, including notes around her mother, her partner and her other children. .  . an absolutely stunning and striking collection.

McSweeney captures how trauma bleeds through everything. . . anguish wells out of her poems as she works to “reconcile grief’s desire to look backward with survival’s command to move forward.

McSweeney’s words. . . give voice to living in the face of grief.

The poems in Death Styles turn a crank that ratchets a moment open, wider and wider, to offer a remarkable, material illustration of grief and of the enormous capacity of what the present can hold.

It is an unflinching eye that captures terrible beauty and beautiful terror in equal measure. But in McSweeney’s poetry, this dialectic is undeniable.

Death Styles reveals how grief swallows the present tense in its black eye, then regurgitates it in spectral forms. . . Undigested memory mutates into the present and appropriates its limbs.