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“‘Shall I exercise my command?’ asks the commandrine, making it clear that this poem, and the rest of this nervy collection, has that most fundamental question of art making at stake: What constitutes the authority of the artist? McSweeney offers no real answer to the ancient unanswerable, but raises the question in a manner as convincing as it is playful.”—Publishers Weekly
The brilliance of Joyelle McSweeney's poems is a given; what remains delightfully open to negotiation are its methodologies and its mien. Is she an earnest relator, using wit and gesture to tell the story faster? Or does she take the piss of her subjects, using perfected skills of mimicry and divination to exploit, spot on, their errant humanities? In her second book McSweeney finds her subjects in the long form; "The Commandrine" is a verse-play that in nine scenes tells the story of sailors Zest, Coast, Ivory, and Irish, and their watery run-in with the Devil. "The Cockatoos Morose" stirs Eliotic grandeur with Stevensian absurdity for a cocktail of delirious observation and rigorous leaps of the sort McSweeney is certain to become famous for. "Crusade-dream flips like a standard. The standard / narrows to a point. And points. / Then it dips like a fern."
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FROM THE BOOK Bugs Bunny, Or, The Mirror that Hid a Little Camera
I'm rundown.
I have a sunburn.
These ears are my liability but they hold a lot.
Like the crazy wheel on the shopping cart,
I schlep and schlep.
Then I pour out all my opera like an anvil.
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Joyelle McSweeney earned her BA from Harvard and holds an MPhil in English Studies from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Brief reviews of hers have appeared in The Boston Review and she is now a staff critic for The Constant Critic. She is a Professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
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