The Necropastoral by Joyelle McSweeney

The Necropastoral Reviews

• 
  Joe

  --Hoooooooo
  …
  How Art was a silver paper moulded to the ceiling
  Where you cut your hair
  For your rebirth as Fata Androgyana
  The scissors-sister who slits where she goes-into
  Cuts as she cuts--)
  
  Yesterday I was at a Lydia Davis reading and the prose guy who was introducing her kept saying there was no precedent for her, that her voice was her own, blah-be-blah-be-blah. And as soon as she started reading, I thought "Russell Edson." And when prose guy asked her about what she read when she was young she said Russell Edson.
  So riding high on having successfully noticed a thing once, I'm just going to guess here one part in the rhizomisphere in terms of the poetics of the poems and oppositional rhetoric of the prose: Amiri Baraka. For poetics, see constant enjambment of relatively short lines, rhymes of short vowels, and a general brilliance re: rhythm:
  “For a total of twelve hours at a clip
  The go-home-and-feed-the-baby milk of it
  That man is a mouth chased by ghosts
  Round a rainslicked hairpin off a cliff in”
  And like AB, McSweeney has been gleefully crossing and inverting genres (sci-fi, horror, etc—o man I wish I had time to read Baraka’s essay on Sun Ra’s sci-fi poetry right now), blowing up the expectations we bring to these genres as readers and, after the concussion, forcing us to re-assemble them out of the rubble. I’m still working out what is being said about the pastoral, anachronism and etc though if you want that, there are plenty of re-interpreters out there.
  What I’ve been thinking about is this: part of the supposed purpose of oppositional rhetoric is that it is catalytic. Some are mobilized and some are repelled. It seeks to create a divisive rupture in the audience, and a protected social space, a flammable wall, for those on behalf of whom the rhetoric is employed. That is, AB’s poetics and rhetoric were at times (and are) linked to a definitive social practice of a self-articulated group. Is McSweeney’s art arriving at a similar crossroads? Who is behind her flammable wall? It doesn’t have to be and there doesn’t have to be anyone. These are not questions of value but of relations. I feel agitations reading The Necropastoral. I don’t understand anything.
  
• 
  david

  Good, not great, like the commandrine and red bird, but the most beautifully packaged. Spork is fantastic in that regard. Kinda scared to approach percussion grenade...
• 
  Kend

  I found this book at a writer's conference several years back, or rather I asked someone selling chapbooks at a booth what he recommended and he put this book into my hands. It is a small but beautifully bound book, with excellent illustrations and thick paper. It was clearly designed by someone with a deft hand for typesetting and so forth, so it's a pleasure to hold in the hand. So small, it might as well be a secret.
  
  As for contents, it's a hybrid little exotic piece of work bookended (literally?) by an essay examining a film I've not only never seen but never even heard of, and deconstructing the idea of "the Pastoral"--and thanks to a rigorous liberal arts education, I at least caught the references to Boccaccio and Chaucer. There was just enough to whet my appetite, which I suppose is the point of a chapbook. On the other hand, McSweeney's poetry did nothing for me. Poetic form being a subjective taste and all that, don't read too much into it when I say "I didn't get it." But I really didn't. I didn't get the imagery or the transitions between ideas. I am running short of sleep these days, though, so ... come for the beauty of this tiny little book, stay for the essay, and take or leave the poetry. I'll revisit this at some nebulous point in the future, I dare say.
• 
  Ryan Bollenbach

  I enjoyed her essays tied to other artists in the first.
  
  I really enjoyed her more roaming essays towards the end, particularly "The 'Future' of 'Poetry'" sequence.