Percussion Grenade

Music and drama as weapons of productive destruction. This collection by prize-winning, massively influential literary star Joyelle McSweeney explodes the twinned and dangerous notions that images are pretty, and that they land predictably. Power struggles in all contexts and the driving ever-presence of a lexicon of puissance make this a bracing read, not for the faint of heart or mind.

From ＂Guadaloop＂

Just inside the cutters’ pavilion
Just at the peak of the oxygen tent
Just on the inner lid of the hairline coma
Just on the inner thighs of the medical canal
Just up under the gesso of lubrication
Just up to the hairline of the hairline crack
Just there where the adolescent girl eyes the camera
Just under the burden of her fishscale hair
Just where one sister shoulders the other
Just why should one sister have to shoulder the other
Just while out of the frame the globe unshouldered rolls around like a boulder in the mouth
Just the whole world like a wadded-up burden in the mouth

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of five books, including The Red Bird, chosen by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. McSweeney is a co-founder of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-quarterly for international writing and hybrid forms, and a contributing editor of the culture blog montevidayo.com. She holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the Iowa Writers Workshop, and is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Notre Dame.

Joyelle McSweeney Joyelle McSweeney is the author of five books: The Necropastoral (Spork Press, 2011), an artist’s book of essays and poems featuring collages by Andrew Shuta; the hybrid novels Flet (Fence, 2008) and Nylund the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007); and the poetry volumes The Commandrine and Other Poems (Fence, 2004) and The Red Bird, which was chosen by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. She also translates the Aeneid. McSweeney’s prose, poetry, drama and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poetry, American Letters and Commentary, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, How2, Jubilat, Conduit, Lamination Colony, and elsewhere, and are featured in such anthologies as My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin 2010) and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande 2006). McSweeney is a co-founder of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-quarterly for international writing and hybrid forms, as well as a contributing editor of the collective culture blog montevidayo.com. McSweeney’s essays on such topics as poetry, art, translation, genre, media, and pedagogy have appeared or are forthcoming in pamphlet form from Ugly Duckling Presse, in journals including New American Writing, Cross Cultural Poetics, and boundary2, in anthologies, such as Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook from the University of Iowa Press, and in on-line blogs, websites and zines. Review essays regularly appear in Rain Taxi, American Book Review, The Boston Review, and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame.