I. The cover of Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles depicts abundant blue and green vegetation, climbing like waves into a bright orange sky. Underneath the ferns, through certain gaps, we can see soft lilac flower buds, pockets of intense light, fruiting berries. At its center, an eclipse encases the title within its thick borders.

I.I. All of this is depicted in the style of a linocut print—a form of printmaking in which the artist carves their design into a linoleum stamp, rolls it with ink, and presses it onto paper. This process is particularly compelling because it is as much a creation of the tools as it is the print itself. The medium manipulated, drawn upon, carved into, inked, only produces the means to create the artwork. When the print is complete, the linoleum stamp—the tool—still remains. It can be re-rolled and aligned to a new sheet of paper to produce further copies. Each resulting image comes from the same source, but it is inevitably skewed, however slightly, by the person creating it, the presence of past inks, the effects of time, etc.

I.II. In the repetition of the task, mutations are unavoidable. Every offspring skews the form of its parentage. Every print archives a present tense in the stamp’s duration. Through this repetition, variation, degradation new meanings arise. The full scope of the artwork comes into view. Mapped through its lineage, we can begin to assemble a total view of the image, otherwise undetectable in each of its atemporal segments.

II. Beneath the linocut, inside the body, Death Styles is approaching a similar task. It too seeks to create a tool, something capable of this repetition, in the production of these suspended temporalities. The book itself documents nine months (from August 2020 to May 2021) of iteration, orating scenes of everyday life in the aftermath of immense grief amidst the conflicting desires to both live in memory and to move forward.

II.I. Each poem is named the date it was written [8.11.20, 8.13.20, 11.23.20, for example], assembled rigorously and spontaneously in the tradition of poets like Bernadette Mayer (Midwinter Day) and Kim Hyesoon (Autobiography of Death).

II.II. In an essay published during the book’s development, “On Death Styles: A Precis,” McSweeney describes her process as being guided by three principles, “I have to write daily, I have to accept any inspiration presented to me in the present tense, however fleeting, and I have to fully follow the flight of that inspiration for as far as it will take me.”

II.II.I. Evidence of  “follow[ing] the flight” appears overtly in the each poem’s date as title, but with more shifting nuance in the poems themselves: “I hate it. No, I like it. / No, I like it” or “I remember one morning where / I remember one early morning” evoke a frantic spill of language. When the mouth struggles to catch each thought. When the thought itself is still unstable, still malleable and soft. Each repetition mutates the line, in turn creates a new line, creates a new thought.

II.II.II. Other moments like, “stolen stollen on my arm” carry this repetition into the minutiae of each line, creating these plosive, sonic moments that contort the mouth into awkward shapes. They simultaneously linger and lurch. The word repeats, but its pressing mutates, however slightly, and creates a new word with very different meanings and applications. The moment of hesitation expands the image. And Death Styles seems to be very much interested, even fixated, on creating this image-in-its-totality, engendering these mutations, their eclipsing conditions and articulations,. It is a driving desire to see the wound from every angle, in every kind of lighting, at all times of day. “To cover every surface with fur” until each slight variation has been witnessed, felt, documented.

II.III. And all of this is locked in a carnivorous present tense, dragging the totality of timelines, memories, fantasies into itself [FUTUREPRESENT, PASTPRESENT]. McSweeney says, “when I am your age I sit in the schoolroom.” She says, “I carry it with me always” and time warps in turn. Our sense of what’s happening, what’s already happened, what’s yet to come distorts and conforms to the anachronistic shape of the Death Styles.

II.III.I. Time forms the most distinguishable separation between grief and survival. With grief pulling us into the past and survival driving us forward. When time fractures the distinction between these desires, their qualities become more difficult to discern. “Even now, even now when we’re so late,” these modes fuse and mutate. Grief can become a tool of survival, survival a trap for grief. In creating this image-in-its-totality, the meaning of certain feelings and experiences expand inward towards an abstract expanse. What began as a grounded memory is quick to descend into ethereal, Hadean landscape.

III. McSweeney’s language is infected, overgrown, dank, animalistic. These otherwise mundane moments of everyday life turn towards feral decay: “a distended abdomen” or “a pier [that] gently rots into the sea.” The ecology of each scene suffers as we revisit, repeat, expand these mutated/ing spaces. It feels as if we are approaching the end of time, long after the lifespan of the mise-en-scene. And yet we watch as the rot deepens in the wood. As fungus splinters bark and spores climb into our throats. The “fleshy bauble” that flourishes “in the nitrogen seams.”

III.I. The necropastoral, by its nature, is an environment spawned from death, but in it, life still thrives. New organisms grow from mammalian remains. Insects and moss feed on toxic ecologies, lap poison like dogs do water. “made bearer / mounted again” in the recurrent cycles of nature. The forest floor flourishes with intense activity. Fallen trees, dilapidated theme parks, places of ‘waste’ or ‘abandon’ become active and excitingly unstable.

III.I.I. In the same that this imagery can so dramatically warp its surroundings, it can activate its substance as well. Memories become overgrown. Grief mutates from an abstract concept, into an ethereal mixture of literary lineages, cartoon violence, Arcadian nature, surreal gesture. It spreads its tendrils “bucking and biting” through the landscape of the interior, latching onto anything it can reach. Every thought, memory, key phrase has the potential to trigger infection. Every scene has the potential to flood with poison.

IV. Each of these shifts, distortions, mutations are quick to appear, swell, subside. Death Styles is a work of intense momentum, perhaps instigated by the spontaneity of each poem’s creation at speed. Every line drives into the next without pause. Many of the poems themselves are formatted as long thin columns with sparse punctuation. Rarely does a line end with a period or comma, instead rapidly moving into the next. It feels as if, when read aloud, everything would be said in one breath, desperately exorcized from the mind and dragged into the net of the text.

IV.I. Every new thought is spawned from its predecessor, but at the same time turns to look in another direction. To check a yet unseen corner of the room. Each poem cannot stop until everything has been expelled “as they race decay to death.” Each thought must be examined thoroughly. Again this image-in-its-totality, involution in its terms: the work cannot be halted until the fog of war is lifted. Until every crevice and alcove has come fully into view

IV.II. In her second collection of poetry, Ablation, Danika Stegeman uses the term “relentless’ to frame the experience of living on in the aftermath of intense trauma and grief. “To survive, you became relentless with yourself.” To move forward, is to become harsh and inflexible not towards the world, but towards the self-destruction that these experiences seek to root into us. 

IV.II.I. To be relentless towards death is to confront its totality, to survive regardless of its grasp. “Some of you owe a lot to death” and it shows.

IV.II.II. This depiction of the relentless / of relentlessness feels deeply ingrained not only in the voice of Death Styles, but in the formal construction of the column. There is no moment of rest. There is no time for grief to gather and accumulate. Even though we repeat, revisit, fracture the temporalities of this pain, it cannot consume us. The intense momentum of the present (and its mutations) skews the positions of grief and survival. Inside-outs each scene. Drags the past forward, the future back.

IV.III. But at the same time, we have not found what we’re looking for. Not in any tangible way. The act of being relentless is performed in response to the innate immovable brutality of trauma. It is a radical reciprocation of power—a refusal to be passive in a system that demands passivity. At the end of Death Styles’s titular first half, McSweeney declares, “I refuse to shut my eyes because I was robbed of something by a god and I’m going to keep looking until I find it.”

IV.III.I. The katabasis is complete. The poet has descended Hades, arrived at the gates, and now in the swell of the garden, declares her intent.