The poems in Joyelle McSweeney and Eleni Sikelianos’s new books, Death Styles and Your Kingdom, echo and vibrate the psychic and material conditions of survival, guided by complicated interconnections that exceed solace or comfort, that bind us to living and dying histories, to histories of living and dying.
Featuring introductions by Noa Mendoza and Sarah Riggs
This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.
Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books in an array of genres, including her newest poetry collection, Death Styles (Nightboat, 2024); the award-winning Toxicon and Arachne; the collaboratively translated Yi Sang: Selected Works; the verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks; and The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, a work of goth ecopoetics. A Guggenheim fellow, McSweeney is also the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the inaugural Fence Modern Poets Series prize, and the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers.
Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, and "a master of mixing genres." She is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Your Kingdom, and two hybrid nonfiction/fiction/image/poetry family histories. Frequently saturated with delight in the natural world and a layperson’s study of biology, her work is dedicated to turning the kaleidoscope for more angles on what being alive looks and feels like. Edge-play manifests in her collaborative work with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists, including Ed Bowes, Courtney Stephens, and Philip Glass.