The Red Bird - Paperback

by Joyelle McSweeney (Author)

Winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize, selected by Allen Grossman. With the persistent, dappled vision of an ecstatic pragmatist, Joyelle McSweeney sees things as they are through "the modern knothole." Eventuality, delicately shaded by the fine and fearless intelligence of these kinesthetic arrangements, coincides with imaginative possibility; the resulting poems are as much mind as place.

"The Red Bird has more in common with a fast red car, except that it does, indeed, fly. Within its agile slips and twists, McSweeney has managed a rare insight, casting our own historical moment as the postmodern medieval, full of knights running errands, where Machu Piccu, Radio Sucre, and lawn chairs all take on Biblical proportions. Except that it's really Darwin we're talking about, as he careens around the globe. She deflates this and other old battles by giving us new terms: 'O beautiful he produceth / language from everyplace / on his body. . .' This is a stunning first book. It glows in the dark."

-Cole Swensen

"[McSweeney's] poems are neither reductive nor fantastic. But they are profoundly mysterious in the way any truthful account of the world must be. Joyelle McSweeney is a poet with a vocation- a calling to the world. What is given her (the vocation) is to make others see what is given her to see."

-Allen Grossman

"In describing, in turn, a "Toy House," "Toy Bed" "Toy Enterprise," "Toy Election," "Toy Maternity," and nine separate accounts of "The Voyage of the Beagle," one might think Joyelle McSweeney lacks high seriousness in The Red Bird, selected by Alan Grossman for Fence Books. While certainly playful and relentlessly up to date (check the "Celebrity Cribs" poem), McSweeney's is a satirist's sensibility, wickedly sending up, in "Avian light," the identities and settings her speaker encounters, whether in books, "a maritime chart of the Yensai Delta" or "Afterlives" "Forsythia opens its bright palm and the woman pushes her stroller out of it."

-Publishers Weekly

Author Biography

Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney's recent book, Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker and 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.Her debut poetry volume, The Red Bird, inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001, while her verse play, Dead Youth, or the Leaks, inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Artists in 2014. 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 from Wave Books alongside translations by Jack Jung and Sawako Nakayasu (2020). With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books which has built readerships for a diverse array of US and international authors from Griffin Prize winners Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky and Raúl Zurita to Jane Wong, Destiny Hemphill and Valerie Hsuing. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at Notre Dame.