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Joyelle McSweeney in the Media

Joyelle McSweeney & Christian Peet talk genre-promiscuity at Ghost Proposal

Ghost Proposal’s issue on “Hybrid Forms & the Post-Genre Approach” features TS author Joyelle McSweeney and TS publisher Christian Peet, along with Tyler Crumrine, T Clutch Fleischmann, Oliver de la Paz, Hannah Brooks-Motl, and Douglas A. Martin.

“An agony of trance”: Joyelle McSweeney interviewed at Fanzine

Joyelle McSweeney: "I realized that the walls and the floors, the soil and the air were toxic, everything that could be seen or touched was poison, everything mankind did made the world worse, just moving around and breathing. It seemed to me that I had been walking in fire. Why had I not known it? Nutriment and poison, protection and hazard, comfort and harm were not binaries but indivisible, each one turning over to reveal its attractively hairy reverse or iridisceing, spiny obverse."

Stockholm International Poetry Festival

TSky Press authors Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney, along with faves Aase Berg and Lara Glenum, are reading at the Stockholm International Poetry Festival, where this year’s theme is Gurlesque.

Joyelle McSweeney’s Salamandrine reviewed at Quarterly West

"In Joyelle McSweeney’s story collection Salamandrine: 8 Gothics, language commits incest with itself.... Sounds repeat, replicate, and mutate in her sentences, monstrous sentences of aural inbreeding and consangeous consonants, strung out and spinning like the dirtiest double-helix, dizzy with disease...."

Joyelle McSweeney’s Salamandrine reviewed at the Brooklyn Rail

"Biological, morbid, fanatic, surreal, McSweeney’s impulses are to go to the rhetoric of the maternity mythos by evoking the spooky, sinuous syntaxes of the gothic and the cleverly constructed political allegory. Salamandrine can be earnest and apocalyptic, playful and arch, but at its core is the proposition that writing the mother-body is a viscid cage match with language and politics in a declining age.... [T]his collection is the sexy teleological apocrypha of motherhood literature, a siren song for those mothers 'with no soul to photograph.'"

Kind words…

...from Patrick Trotti at JMWW, regarding our three 2013 prose titles, from Claire Donato, Johannes Göransson, and Joyelle McSweeney: "Avant-garde writers of the past are put through a blender topped with equal parts muscle relaxer, speed, acid, and a new, distinct style forcing the reader to down the contents in one giant gulp. It will leave you feeling as though they just went speeding through a backyard makeshift house of mirrors ride that was rigged with no brakes, bending through the maze of tight corners to the point where you can the feel the sharp shards of glass on your forearm if you don’t keep your hand inside the ride that is their minds."

Joyelle McSweeney interviewed at Monkeybicycle

Joyelle McSweeney: "For me motherhood was an apocalypse, a rending of the veil, a rendering of the fail. I nearly died; that was a new thing. I developed a labor complication normally associated with heroin-addicted teenage sex-workers. I bled like crazy and my daughter’s placenta looked like hamburger meat, according to the nurse. A fittingly Midwest simile."

Joyelle McSweeney interviewed by John Madera at Big Other

Joyelle McSweeney: "This book of mine is a war against capitalism through the body of the culturally vaunted (but actually exploited) figure of the mother. Here the mothers are totally undone, desperate, weaponized, vacant, bloodthirsty, deranged, or ingenious as hell. None of them is what you’d call wholesome—and neither is the writing."

Publishers Weekly reviews Joyelle McSweeney’s Salamandrine: 8 Gothics

McSweeney's breakneck prose harnesses the throbbing pulse of language itself and thus eludes any sort of straightforward plot development.... The stream of consciousness of an unhinged mother inhabiting a real or imagined apocalyptic landscape.... Vertiginous.... Denying the reader any orienting poles for the projected reality.

NewPages reviews Joyelle McSweeney’s Nylund, the Sarcographer

At NewPages, Cynthia Reeser reviews Joyelle McSweeney's *Nylund, the Sarcographer* (Tarpaulin Sky Press): "Joyelle McSweeney has not only created a unique concept – that of sarcography – she has illustrated it memorably with a masterful redefinition of what constitutes prose, and created a character who is the very embodiment of writing, reminding us of how flexible the narrative form can be."

At Harriet, Stephen Burt reviews Joyelle McSweeney's Nylund, the Sarcographer

At the Poetry Foundation's Harriet, Stephen Burt reviews Joyelle McSweeney's *Nylund, the Sarcographer* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007): "Flights of campy-cum-lyrical post-Ashberyan prose.... The Daisy parts are actually sexy, the murder-mystery parts and the furniture-store bits are genuinely funny, the language dissolves into stream-of-consanguinity post-surrealism and then resolves into a plot again.... It’s recommended"

Joyelle McSweeney interviewed at Prick of the Spindle

At Prick of the Spindle, Cynthia Reeser interviews Joyelle McSweeney (*Nylund, the Sarcographer*, Tarpaulin Sky Press): "Once you put the sarcography in motion as a matter of writing, then anything can happen, because the sentence can always open up trapdoors and catwalks via its clauses and phrases and puns and jokes and fantasies and so forth. In fact, the one rule I had when writing this was not to use good taste or understatement or comely resonance at all, but just to follow all my stray ideas, at the level of the sentence, to keep it opening, twinning, diverging, dividing. I used more conventional aspects of noir—a dead woman, a missing woman, a young hood, an (elderly) femme fatale—as sort of course correction as the book ran along."

Bookslut reviews Joyelle McSweeney’s Nylund, the Sarcographer

At Bookslut, Christopher Higgs reviews Joyelle McSweeney's *Nylund, the Sarcographer*: "Nylund, the Sarcographer is like interesting on steroids. Caution: if you are looking for a typical, straight forward, good old fashioned yarn, you’d do best to look elsewhere; but if you want to experience something fresh, daring, creepy, and significant, this is the one for you. It is the opposite of boring, an ominous conflagration devouring the bland terrain of conventional realism, the kind of work that tickles your inner ear, gives you the shivers, and tricks your left brain into thinking that your right brain has staged a coup d'état....Other than the incomparable Ben Marcus, I’m not sure anyone in contemporary letters can compete with the voracity of ingenuity, complexity, and beauty of McSweeney’s usage."

Joyelle McSweeney in the Media

Joyelle McSweeney & Christian Peet talk genre-promiscuity at Ghost Proposal

Ghost Proposal’s issue on “Hybrid Forms & the Post-Genre Approach” features TS author Joyelle McSweeney and TS publisher Christian Peet, along with Tyler Crumrine, T Clutch Fleischmann, Oliver de la Paz, Hannah Brooks-Motl, and Douglas A. Martin.

“An agony of trance”: Joyelle McSweeney interviewed at Fanzine

Joyelle McSweeney: "I realized that the walls and the floors, the soil and the air were toxic, everything that could be seen or touched was poison, everything mankind did made the world worse, just moving around and breathing. It seemed to me that I had been walking in fire. Why had I not known it? Nutriment and poison, protection and hazard, comfort and harm were not binaries but indivisible, each one turning over to reveal its attractively hairy reverse or iridisceing, spiny obverse."

Stockholm International Poetry Festival

TSky Press authors Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney, along with faves Aase Berg and Lara Glenum, are reading at the Stockholm International Poetry Festival, where this year’s theme is Gurlesque.

Joyelle McSweeney’s Salamandrine reviewed at Quarterly West

"In Joyelle McSweeney’s story collection Salamandrine: 8 Gothics, language commits incest with itself.... Sounds repeat, replicate, and mutate in her sentences, monstrous sentences of aural inbreeding and consangeous consonants, strung out and spinning like the dirtiest double-helix, dizzy with disease...."

Joyelle McSweeney’s Salamandrine reviewed at the Brooklyn Rail

"Biological, morbid, fanatic, surreal, McSweeney’s impulses are to go to the rhetoric of the maternity mythos by evoking the spooky, sinuous syntaxes of the gothic and the cleverly constructed political allegory. Salamandrine can be earnest and apocalyptic, playful and arch, but at its core is the proposition that writing the mother-body is a viscid cage match with language and politics in a declining age.... [T]his collection is the sexy teleological apocrypha of motherhood literature, a siren song for those mothers 'with no soul to photograph.'"

Kind words…

...from Patrick Trotti at JMWW, regarding our three 2013 prose titles, from Claire Donato, Johannes Göransson, and Joyelle McSweeney: "Avant-garde writers of the past are put through a blender topped with equal parts muscle relaxer, speed, acid, and a new, distinct style forcing the reader to down the contents in one giant gulp. It will leave you feeling as though they just went speeding through a backyard makeshift house of mirrors ride that was rigged with no brakes, bending through the maze of tight corners to the point where you can the feel the sharp shards of glass on your forearm if you don’t keep your hand inside the ride that is their minds."

Joyelle McSweeney interviewed at Monkeybicycle

Joyelle McSweeney: "For me motherhood was an apocalypse, a rending of the veil, a rendering of the fail. I nearly died; that was a new thing. I developed a labor complication normally associated with heroin-addicted teenage sex-workers. I bled like crazy and my daughter’s placenta looked like hamburger meat, according to the nurse. A fittingly Midwest simile."

Joyelle McSweeney interviewed by John Madera at Big Other

Joyelle McSweeney: "This book of mine is a war against capitalism through the body of the culturally vaunted (but actually exploited) figure of the mother. Here the mothers are totally undone, desperate, weaponized, vacant, bloodthirsty, deranged, or ingenious as hell. None of them is what you’d call wholesome—and neither is the writing."

Publishers Weekly reviews Joyelle McSweeney’s Salamandrine: 8 Gothics

McSweeney's breakneck prose harnesses the throbbing pulse of language itself and thus eludes any sort of straightforward plot development.... The stream of consciousness of an unhinged mother inhabiting a real or imagined apocalyptic landscape.... Vertiginous.... Denying the reader any orienting poles for the projected reality.

NewPages reviews Joyelle McSweeney’s Nylund, the Sarcographer

At NewPages, Cynthia Reeser reviews Joyelle McSweeney's *Nylund, the Sarcographer* (Tarpaulin Sky Press): "Joyelle McSweeney has not only created a unique concept – that of sarcography – she has illustrated it memorably with a masterful redefinition of what constitutes prose, and created a character who is the very embodiment of writing, reminding us of how flexible the narrative form can be."

At Harriet, Stephen Burt reviews Joyelle McSweeney's Nylund, the Sarcographer

At the Poetry Foundation's Harriet, Stephen Burt reviews Joyelle McSweeney's *Nylund, the Sarcographer* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007): "Flights of campy-cum-lyrical post-Ashberyan prose.... The Daisy parts are actually sexy, the murder-mystery parts and the furniture-store bits are genuinely funny, the language dissolves into stream-of-consanguinity post-surrealism and then resolves into a plot again.... It’s recommended"

Joyelle McSweeney interviewed at Prick of the Spindle

At Prick of the Spindle, Cynthia Reeser interviews Joyelle McSweeney (*Nylund, the Sarcographer*, Tarpaulin Sky Press): "Once you put the sarcography in motion as a matter of writing, then anything can happen, because the sentence can always open up trapdoors and catwalks via its clauses and phrases and puns and jokes and fantasies and so forth. In fact, the one rule I had when writing this was not to use good taste or understatement or comely resonance at all, but just to follow all my stray ideas, at the level of the sentence, to keep it opening, twinning, diverging, dividing. I used more conventional aspects of noir—a dead woman, a missing woman, a young hood, an (elderly) femme fatale—as sort of course correction as the book ran along."

Bookslut reviews Joyelle McSweeney’s Nylund, the Sarcographer

At Bookslut, Christopher Higgs reviews Joyelle McSweeney's *Nylund, the Sarcographer*: "Nylund, the Sarcographer is like interesting on steroids. Caution: if you are looking for a typical, straight forward, good old fashioned yarn, you’d do best to look elsewhere; but if you want to experience something fresh, daring, creepy, and significant, this is the one for you. It is the opposite of boring, an ominous conflagration devouring the bland terrain of conventional realism, the kind of work that tickles your inner ear, gives you the shivers, and tricks your left brain into thinking that your right brain has staged a coup d'état....Other than the incomparable Ben Marcus, I’m not sure anyone in contemporary letters can compete with the voracity of ingenuity, complexity, and beauty of McSweeney’s usage."

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