Epistolary review by Vi Khi Nao

On Percussion Grenade [2012]: Joyelle McSweeney (122 pgs) FENCE

Dear Joyelle McSweeney,

So shall I begin with a ding-dong? The theater can tolerate a lot of mucking around. Perhaps when you write poems you are trying to make us lose our memories or our bonding for pleasure. Generally, we have no access point to enter your poems. Your sonic doors are locked and if we unlock them, we lose our memory and our pleasure. But, it seems, here, you have found your hyper-catatonic form in the chthonic lithe body of the mythological postmodern. Your Percussion Grenade is filled with unholy things: blood, frogman (15), Swan, Narcissus, alphasoup (15), epiphaneedle (15), rhinocerine eros (15), Opeeeeeeeeevisceration! (16) Ohkayohkay (17) King Prion, Fata Androgyana (22), Ms. MERONGRONGRONG (47), putrescence celestial excrescence (50), Chimneyfuckerers (71), conflagrating faction (101), Fiend, God, the Devil, and Louis Braille. The stronger part of your poetry exists on the first few pages, where you open your coeval poetic moorland with contemporary, quotidian dialects, which chase each other around like the tail of a carapace fed rat. But your strongest poetry exists in your highly octave playful, comically repulsive play: which is your form at its most deformed and it’s beautiful. Your passion pouring, controlling its own temperament and temperature. I feel heated reading your words, but not incinerated. Not yet. Not until I get to the end of your necropastoral farce: The Contagious Knives. This is the vessel that will allow you to ride the moonswoon current without misfiring, misleading, your grenade at the right tempo, within the human distance. Here, we find your Swan, de-feathered, incinerated, and ashy for the sake of war. This is your kind of love. Here, you make language wear bikini sweaters in frigid, gelid arctic. Here you allow your words to freeze to death before you incinerated them. Here, you take us on a wild stroll through the wasteland of your imagination. You even make your Narcissus recumbent, propagate a mandrake root, and eviscerate him before our very own eyes. Even your God has an asshole. You take us to your Louis Braille. Your Louis Braille is busy “straddling Swan, removes awl head-dress, takes switchblade and cuts off curls, dips black plastic comb in muckpond and combs hair into a petroleum pompadour, lipsticks his lips cherry red and inexact.” Your writing is incongruous, transexual, defacing, challenging the structure of the macabre and the mythological and the political, and even necrophilia is attracted to your necropastoral, and later, and not too much later, you take the endtour cul-de-sac flights through a few catastrophes (four), poem for catastrophe. It’s life that makes you “devoutly sinusoidal” (54) and it’s in death, that we had to subsume the flesh of your text and having deeply subsumed by your Swan, call its body part video-tape, part hip-hop, part zombie music, and part lullaby to put [your] incongruent Mowgli and Mowgli’s Bowgli fed children to sleep. You are courageous and proud and you accommodate the decomposing body of anything. Your blade is swift and your voice, half-honeyed, half-caustic, pouring with the bitchy blood-filled Orpheusic Ophelia while infusing it with half a pint of sugar, a pint of flea, a pint of Swan Song. The opening of your ACT 3 is incurably devilish: “O custom dress you did festoon/ a body empty as the moon/ O custom dress you did enlace/ a body empty as a face/ and now I wear you on my limbs/ a sexy treat for hers and hims/ a bon-bon with a bloody thrum.” You sense there is so much beauty in the grotesque. You even make your last poem wear a doorbell. So, shall I begin with a ding dong?