Toxicon & Arachne

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The kamikaze fantasy arises, like everything in this frightening and brilliant book, not from a pleasant "brainstorm" but from the animal reflexes of the "brainstem". The defeat is total: a rout, a blowout. Now that the tables have been permanently turned, "the popsong plays" on "the toy turntable" in the nursery and also - you can hear the faint pun - "in eternity".' Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker 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 and Arachne, form a double collection of poems weighing love, grief, art and survival in increasingly toxic days.Toxicon and Arachne is the culmination of eight years of engagement with lyric under a regime of global and personal catastrophes.