May
24
12:00am
Rumpus Poetry Book Club presents Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles & Kazim Ali, a founder of Nightboat Books
By The Rumpus
Join us for an exclusive Rumpus Poetry Book Club conversation with author Joyelle McSweeney, a founder of Nightboat Books, Kazim Ali, and Rumpus Poetry Editor, Brian Spears. They’ll discuss Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles and share how it fits into Nightboat Books’s editorial vision.
About the May Poetry Book Club selection:
In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely—River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk—McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day. In frank, mesmeric lyrics, Death Styles navigates the opposing forces of survival and grief, finding a way to press against death’s interface, to step the wrong way out of the grave.
Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of eleven books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney's recent books include Death Styles (Nightboat Books, 2024) and Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), which earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. With Carmen Maria Machado, she was the guest editor of Best American Experimental Writing 2020. She also collaborated with Don Mee Choi on translations of two short stories by Korean modernist Yi Sang, featured in Yi Sang: Selected Works alongside translations by Jack Jung and Sawako Nakayasu (2020). With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at Notre Dame.
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry Sukun: New and Selected Poems; Inquisition; Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque; and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon and Wind Instrument. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. His memoir, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water was published to acclaim in 2021. A founder of Nightboat Books, Ali is Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
Brian Spears is Senior Poetry Editor at The Rumpus and author of A Witness in Exile (Louisiana Literature Press 2011). He lives in Des Moines.
Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk.
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