Joyelle McSweeney

Joyelle McSweeney Poems

Joyelle McSweeney Biography

Joyelle McSweeney was born in Boston and spent most of her childhood in suburban Philadelphia. She has a BA from Harvard University; an MPhil in English studies from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. McSweeney’s collections of poetry include The Red Bird (2002), winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poetry Series, and The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004). She is also author of the novels Nyland, the Sarcographer (2007) and Flet (2007). In an interview McSweeney described what she called her “magpie-aesthetic,” apparent in The Red Bird, noting that “even when I’m not writing with overtly found materials, I think my brain works on language the same way—selecting, assembling, sounding out complexes and runs.” Matthew Henriksen commented on the technique in a review of The Commandrine and Other Poems: “Perspectives may diverge and take hold of their own visions. . . . McSweeney treats words, like images, as instances of their precise contents rather than symbolic references.” Joyelle McSweeney is co-founder of www.actionyes.org, a web-based journal featuring international writing and hybrid forms, and Action Books, a press that publishes poetry and books in translation. She has taught at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In April 2014, Joyelle McSweeney was a featured writer for Harriet.)

The Best Poem Of Joyelle McSweeney

Bureau of

This is the body of,
waiting to turn on.

graced with a little tremor,
a little-known form, a fibrous hook,
a flimsy lever that makes the jar work

a lever and a clasp

:voila. The pathetic filofax
unfurls, the owl describes;
on air; makes an apse; lopes left

off the phonepole, woodenly.
we rise above the wind park,
commemorially.

our whorled fossil, pinned open.
our emergency kit
holds aspirin. digitalis. adrenalin-in-in.

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