Toxicon & Arachne

by Joyelle McSweeney

'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 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.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 7, 2020

About the author

Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard before earning an MPhil from Oxford and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

With Johannes Göransson, McSweeney founded and edits Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation. The press focuses on modern and contemporary works from Latin America, Asia, the US and Europe, including such major authors as Hiromi Itō, Kim Hyesoon, Aase Berg and Raul Zurita. Action Books seeks to move poetry and poetics from other literary cultures into the center of US poetry discussions and undermine the nationalist rubrics under which literature is marketed and discussed. In addition to the University of Notre Dame, McSweeney has taught in the MFA program at the University of Alabama and as a Visiting Associate Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Reviews

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joyelle McSweeney's poetry is hair-raisingly smart and unerringly focused. Her words wrap tendrils of possibility around one's mind and opens it accordingly. Sweet morsels titillate the senses, making one hungry for more. The author expresses her surroundings and emotions in honest and gut-wrenching form, drawing us straight into the heart of motherhood. "Morning wants an eidelon."

[Alissa Hattman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found Toxicon and Arachne to be challenging, but a profound and productive challenge.

Reading “Toxicon” felt like witnessing someone rummaging through a trash heap full of vomit, pollutants, cell phones, Greek warriors, hell fruit, greasy beads, black light, and body parts. It was horrific but also fascinating. I found “Arachne” less challenging intellectually, but far more challenging emotionally. As I read, I felt caught up in a terrifying web of an unspeakable incalculable loss. McSweeney writes about the death of her baby with such urgency that it was often hard to bear. At the same time, I found it moving and almost cathartic in its gritty, honest vulnerability.

This quote from Dan Chiasson’s review of Toxicon and Arachne has been stuck in my head all week: “Poetry isn’t a séance, as it was for Yeats; it’s biohazard, teeming with linguistic contagion.” The quote makes me think of Plato’s Pharmakon, where writing is considered both poison and remedy. From Plato to the Romantics, this idea is not new, but I think McSweeney’s engagement with this—what to call it? A theory? An anxiety? A double bind?—this concept of writing being both poison and remedy is uniquely handled with regards to the birth/death trauma that McSweeney experienced.

I think many of us go to poetry to be a salve, to help us to heal during dark times. Toxicon and Arachne actively rejects this and forces the ear to listen to the hurt and horror, to sit with it, to bear witness to the sorrow of the moment, without any assurance that we will heal.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning! Sonance and wordplay to the fore, just my kind of writing (both in poetry as here, but also in prose)

Video review https://youtu.be/Hzu93GcDO2w

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Devastating, in particular the second part. I think this book would best be read out loud, the vowel rhyming made me think often of rap lyrics but it’s totally not rap.

The poems about her baby daughter who died in the NICU were so harrowing and sad. The book for me cohered around this focus of pain; until then it felt a little formless. Maybe because I knew it was coming. The poem entitled “And I Might Find Her If I’m Looking Like I Can,” I had read before online. Might be my favorite poem in the book. I think I liked McSweeney’s Death Styles a little more than this book.

[Karla Strand · Rating 5 out of 5]

These two collections are powerful and utterly heartbreaking. The first, Toxicon, was written during McSweeney’s pregnancy. The second, Arachne, written after the birth, short life, and death of her daughter named Arachne. The poems are challenging both in form and content. They are smart and wise. They brought tears to my eyes. A moving reading experience.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a devastating read, but one of the strongest single author collections I’ve read. If you read the blurb you know what it’s about. The first half takes the stress and chaos of pregnancy in the modern age and abstracts the sensation through anachronistic language, heavy riffing on Keats and all sorts of rhythmic wordplay (consonance, assonance, other poetic terms I’m probably unfamiliar with). But there’s a persistent through-line, and it builds until the final nightmare of explosive, near-feral grief of the second half drops like a bomb on an orphanage.

The first half of the book feels like carefully assembled art—playful and frenetic and caustic in turns, but the author is kept at arms length, rarely goes confessional for more than a line or two. The back half feels like probing an open wound. It’s almost too raw to read. Reading the poem that meditates on Dreft - a hypoallergenic baby soap with an unfortunate composite name built off dread and bereft - pushes you to the empathetic limit. As a parent, I read this and physically ache at the senselessness, the hideous tragedy of life, at the author’s loss and brutal honesty. Often when you come across a book about grief, it’s described as a “meditation on loss and meaning” or something similarly soft and glossy. This isn’t that. It’s rough, warped, and broken. Beautifully wrought, in its way, but just gutting. Utterly essential.

[B.J. Swann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Excruciating.

[Sofia Fernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s challenging to read, but impactful. The parts I can decipher are anywhere from profound to overwhelming. Found it in a bookstore in a different country, nice surprise.

[Janel D. Brubaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's something to be said for a book of poems that continues to call back its reader. I've read this book twice now and, while the writing still leaves me baffled and breathless, I can't ever seem to get this book out of my mind.

It's written in two parts, Toxicon, which was written during Joyelle McSweeney's pregnancy, and Arachne, which covers the birth, short life, and death of her daughter. The imagery in this collection is utterly mind blowing. The way she uses language to capture two such incredible experiences - pregnancy and loss of a child - is truly something I have never seen before. The words she chooses, the layouts of the poems, the line breaks all seem to instinctively capture the bodily and emotional experiences McSweeney has had.

There's one section in particular that stood out to me both times I read this book. I believe it's in part one, she includes a series of sonnets which all begin with the last line of the previous sonnet. I found myself wanting to not just mingle, but submerge myself in these sonnets for as long as the book would last. There was something jarring about seeing the last line of one poem cross over into the first line of the next poem that felt exactly like gestation. And not just the gestation of her daughter, but the gestation of the loss that would follow her birth. It's inspired me to play around with this in my own work, to see all of the places where my sonnets might take me.

It's hard to write this review because I have so many positive things I can say about this book, but I have to be honest and say that I only gave it 3 stars. Both times I read it, I landed at 3 stars. Because while this book truly is phenomenal and I'm sure I'll read it again, there were too many moments where I felt lost among its weeds. And while that might have been intentional, I found myself really struggling to ground myself in what was being said. To the point, that at times I had to skip the rest of a poem because I simply couldn't track what was being said.

Even as I'm writing this, I feel conflicted because I can see how the speaker might want the reader to be lost, even completely lost, throughout the entirety of the book. It seems like it probably mirrors the feeling of loss one has when they lose a child. But I never felt that my own wanderings through this book was really meant to accomplish anything or lead me anywhere specific. And it's not that it has to, either, just that by the time I finished the book, rather than feel overwhelmed by the writing and the emotional impact of her work, I felt more relieved that it was over. And I know it seems very self-centered, wanting someone else's writing to point back out to me in some way, but as an aspiring poet myself, this is one of the primary ways we revise our work: taking what starts out pointing at ourselves and finding ways of expanding the lens outward to include the reader.

Which, I suppose, is my primary critique of this work. The lens remains hyper-focused on the speaker and there are very few moments when I, the reader, am allowed to come into the experience with her. The writing itself is truly exquisite, and the visceral ways she looks at the body and pregnancy without almost ever using those words, is something that still takes my breath away. There's no cliche or tired language in her work at all. The imagery and the metaphors seem completely brand new and strange in the best of ways. And I commend McSweeney for writing about both her experience with pregnancy, and her experience of losing her daughter. These are subjects which are excruciatingly difficult to write about.

But I still have to give the book 3 stars because, in the end, there was too much of a disconnect. I was allowed to be a witness, but it felt almost begrudged, like I was imposing on her experience rather than being invited into it. And for me, that made the reading experience deeply uncomfortable.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course, being a weak writer, I want to say rare. I want to say rare in as few words as possible in the direction of Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon And Arachne. Somewhere two toothaches are perhaps reunited. Somewhere one is unpinned from the world while feeling in the dark for a donkey born without a tail. I also want to say playful, but no. Sadness loses all its money to sorrow and there is a jovial genius to the trauma of wordplay. I think what McSweeney does is done with what I’ll call, in my lack, the endangered available. Mouth of a gift hearse. Erasure’s only prediction. From such given, McSweeney recreates addendum without precedent. Think of what one hasn’t read, that is being written, and how briefly it will exist unwitnessed. And how fast the work of de-witness. And how suddenly we’re having the dream that just recently we lied about having. I love this work for its slowness, for the uninfluenced offhand of its disruptive healing. Here is a line from McSweeney’s poem PT Cruiser: ‘That’s like, harmonic. Monstrous.’ I am injected, I guess, to vaccinate the new you. Loss has two syllables: loss, comma, loss. The verse of Toxicon and Arachne lives in the present and in the present it took.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This show is so expensive.

Its price is hard to swallow.

It is such a showstopper.

It replicates the wooden elevator of the police
right down to the know in the wood
like the waved fist in a sonogram
right down to the fist in the eye."

/

"this endtime's gonna last awhile / a cartoon toucan flies through the chemo suite"

/

"There is so much we can learn
by how obediently a child
takes up this work
how its small jaw will unhinge
as it eats its way
out of the grave"

"Post-Nicu Villanelle" as a poem is a universe of grief and wonder. It'd be unkind to quote any one line.

Want to invent a syllabus revolving around this book to make the kind of space I want to read it again.

[Jess Hagemann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am fascinated by grief and the body—specifically grief that results from the body—and Arachne (the final part of this collection) delivered in a huge way with McSweeney’s raw dissection of motherhood in the aftermath of her infant’s death. I’m not a mom, but I was nevertheless shaken. Her words stayed with me long after I read them.

[Curt Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. It's a rare combination of mash-up, chance variations and Shakespearean rhythm and without seeming pretentious or ponderous.

[jess liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

metastasizing in my brain. knocking it to powder. rattling the sky-cage. teething all the bodies from the bottom of the ocean. a masterclass in associative cascades — the sonic and conceptual mutate into one another, release the same writhing, blooming, green odor. i only really cry reading a poem when it's joyelle mcsweeney's.

"Bad host, you clutch your guest. Green seam
fluoresces in night vision, signature of
heat and flesh. Green ghost
lifts headline to the camera, proof of life
washed white by sudden flash. From satellite,
Earth turns on spit like a gut infloresced
with bad intentions. A god descends
with gifts of poetry and plague, he lights up
factory hens, a baffling intervention. They tote
their viral load on wheel, on wing, on breast,
transmigrate the globe and upload
souls to Heaven. O victor-bird, o vector,
I am like you, a non-state actor,
Death-fletched, alive, immune to all elixirs." (31)
———
"A descent
in the price of dishwashers
A rise
in the striations
in the teeth
of child-skeletons
in a pit
beside the workhouse
There is so much we can learn
by how obediently a child
takes up this work
how its small jaw will unhinge
as it eats its way
out of the grave
in autumn
cranes striate
the dentine of the sky
deciding whether to descend
as night closes its jaw
teeth shatter
and lodge as stars in its pink roof
they are only graceful
when they are in the air
but think themselves graceful
always
my children" (71)

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Like any light now breaking in the sky / I am the arrow: I ride and I decline.” Within Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne, lie dozens of lively, exceptional, emotional, unbearable poems, a reflection on “how the body gestate[s] grief”, an outstanding and formally exciting symphony of poems. The first, bulkiest part of the collection, Toxicon, is dark and oblique, endlessly refreshing through formal variety and effervescent word choices; meanwhile the short second part Arachne moves to a more intensely personal register to plumb the unbearable depths of loss, grief — the vain hope of moving on. “Night, the insane / asylum of the plants, / shoot me through mine hearts / and let me walk out on my hands.” Structurally, I noticed that until the penultimate two poems, the poems in this collection had always started on the right-hand leaf; both of these final two poems begin on the left-hand leaf, which earlier in the collection is frequently blank; this shift, in eradicating the excess white space of immeasurable grief, signals McSweeney’s hard commitment to hope and redemption. “Bereft of sense / I don’t want to make sense / But I want to make something.”

[Cassie · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I met Joyelle McSweeney, she admitted that she thought "Death Styles" was a perfect book, a feat she had never reached and would never reach again. Her poetic style—rambling, tangential, floaty—shined around the traumatic subject matter. In "Toxicon and Arachne," I got a sense that the style was waiting to find its subject matter. I would give most of the "Toxicon" portion two stars. There were some highlights, like the sonnets, but it's hard to connect to these lofty, loosely-connected ideas without something to ground the reader.

And then I reached "Arachne." I had already heard Joyelle read "Morning Wants an Eidolon," but wow. The entire section hits. It's depressing, haunted by the loss of Arachne—Joyelle's late baby, who died after only thirteen days—but it is so, so beautiful. I hate to find credence in the "tortured artist" stereotype but I think that Joyelle's style peaked in the "Arachne" portion, and in her most recent work, "Death Styles."

My overall rating is an average between "Arachne"'s four stars and "Toxicon"'s two.

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impossible to know, in Joyelle McSweeney's Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books), if in the battle between you and your terror, you are the pursuant or the possessed. These poems come at you hard, reminding you that life is harder, that poison seeps into the groundwater of everything... and that somehow, confronting all this, our fragile, ridiculous, empyrean hearts keep knocking, bravely.

"Never a wide enough mouth to crunch around the bones of the bird
Never enough digestive juices to leach the crime from the bones of the earth"

[2/31]
#TheSealeyChallenge

[AJ Lonski · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really cherish experimental poetry, but definitely found this reading to be difficult.

For the first 3/4 of the book, the writing did not resonate with me — I feel as though it could start with the Arachne section. The sections prior felt disjointed, and complex for the sake of, well, complexity. Lots of tongue twisters, alliteration, metaphors — which you could certainly argue are the “experimental” aspect of this collection, but I didn’t necessarily identify WHY I was reading what I read.

The first 3/4 of the book (prior to Arachne): ⭐️⭐️
Arachne on: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[A L]

An amazing lamentation, full of modernist technique and really in the muck; reminded me of Michael Laly.

[George Abraham · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most haunting & breathtaking recent works I've read - absolutely one to be (capital R) Read very slowly & deeply. So many absolutely unforgettable poems here.

[Sarah Tomasulo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous. I read these poems without the context of pregnancy and loss. There are so many brilliant tapestries woven depicting the amalgam of human vulnerability and fortitude. A lovely collection.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was some of the most exciting and beautiful poetry I've read, just from a linguistic perspective. I didn't always understand the poems, but the overall theme was heartwrenching.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly the five stars here are for "Arachne" above all. Just heartbreaking and beautiful while still being quite weird. I found a lot of the other poems just kept bouncing off me.

[edmondegreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it.

[ʕっ•ᴥ•ʔっ · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's definitely some poetry.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hyperdiction and rage very inspiring.

[sheng]

liked: the sonnet crown for john keats, the sestinas, the villanelle, "Arachne"

I didn't like the free verse poems as much :(

[Skeptickle · Rating 5 out of 5]

May the light keep shining on every form of your being, Arachne.

[julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'm not an actress i'm a writer

i'll die not like a princess but a spy

a cosmic, ruined garden

let beauty be convulsive/or not at all

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, instructive, and bold. This made me think differently about life and about language. Will absolutely return to this.