'The power of McSweeney's work cannot be separated from its association with forms of oracle and soothsaying, and so it is uncanny that it should arrive in the middle of a global pandemic... Frightening and brilliant' Dan Chiasson, New Yorker How does the body gestate grief? How does toxicity birth catastrophe? In the months leading up to her daughter Arachne's birth, US poet Joyelle McSweeney set out to write a quiver of poems like a quiver of poison arrows: formally and sonically virtuosic, laced with the poet's obsessive concerns with contamination, decay and the sublime, featuring a crown of 'toxic sonnets' for the tuberculosis bacterium that killed Keats. But when Arachne was born with an unexpected birth defect, lived briefly and died, the poet was visited by a second welter of poems, odes of love, grief, perplexity and rage. These two books, Toxicon & Arachne, form a double collection of poems weighing love, grief, art and survival in increasingly toxic days. Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.

In Toxicon & Arachne, McSweeney allows the lyric to course through her like a toxin, producing a quiver of lyrics like poisoned arrows. Toxicon was written in anticipation of the birth of McSweeney's daughter, Arachne. But when Arachne was born sick, lived brie?fly, and then died, McSweeney unexpectedly endured a second inundation of lyricism, which would become the poems in Arachne, this time spun with grief. Toxicon & Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.

"Flet" is set in a spaced-out, delimited future in which all cities have been evacuated after an "Emergency," and is named for its quiescent-but-full-of-agency female protagonist. Flet is an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the oft-invoked Emergency, after which all public spaces are off-limits, is a tool of sociopolitical manipulation, if not oppression: the decentralized citizenry binge on endless, aimless filetape transmissions drained into their homes. A face-off between this tentative muckraker and her icy superior is set to go down at a mandatory, nationwide Reenactment, in advance of which Flet finds herself dreaming and driving endlessly off the map. Will she find the missing cities, or will she lose herself in the flood-tide of images that wash over the Nation?An elegant entry in the field of speculative fiction, "Flet" finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination and syntax down to the speed of narrative.

With the persistent, dappled vision of an ecstatic pragmatist, Joyelle McSweeney sees things as they are through "the modern knothole": "Up on the hill, / a white tent had just got unsteadily to its feet/ like a foal or a just-foaled cathedral." Eventuality, as it is delicately shaded by the fine and fearless intelligence of these kinesthetic arrangements, coincides with imaginative possibility; the resulting poems are as much mind as place; much galaxy as time-inevitable and correct as only true whimsy can be.
"Outside, the web of tenthousandthings; / inside here, only three: filmstrip of a helicopter's shadow; / against an Antarctic wall; silkscreen/ of the grand central ceiling. The idealized landscape-/ I want a room in it."