Joyelle McSweeney Reads Death Styles, November 20th, 2024
an evening of poetry and companionship at Green College in Vancouver and via Livestream
Hi Friends,
It’s a pleasure to welcome Joyelle McSweeney as our second reader for this year’s Whole Cloth Reading Series. Joyelle will join us to read her book Death Styles cover-to-cover in the congenial atmosphere of the Green College Coach House. Thanks to the generosity of Green College, we’ll be able to provide several copies for audience members to follow along on the page and take home after the event. We look forward to sharing an evening exploring style as survival together.
Wednesday, November 20th, 2024
5 - 7 pm (with dinner to follow—see below about how to reserve a spot / free meals for UBC students!)
Coach House, Green College, University of British Columbia
and via Zoom Livestream
The Reader: Joyelle McSweeney
Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, prose, drama, criticism, and translation, including her recent poetry collections Death Styles and Toxicon and Arachne, her verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks, and her critical book The Necropastoral, a widely-read work of goth ecopoetics. With Johannes Göransson, she is co-founder of the international press Action Books which has helped build readerships for poets such as Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi, Aase Berg, and Raúl Zurita. She lives in South Bend, Indiana, and teaches at Notre Dame.
The Book: Death Styles
In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely—River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk—McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day. In frank, mesmeric lyrics, Death Styles navigates the opposing forces of survival and grief, finding a way to press against death’s interface, to step the wrong way out of the grave.
The Event: The Whole Cloth Reading Series
An experience in deep listening, each Whole Cloth Reading Series event features a single poet who reads an entire book of poems from cover to cover. While poets devote immense craft to shaping a book, public readings tend to favor selections and excerpts. Uniting writer and audience in a celebration of expansive and unhurried attention, this series creates a rare environment for the investigation of poetry, sound, delivery, and reciprocity. Each event features a transformative (short!) book and concludes in time for a cordial reception and conversation.
A Dinner Invitation
The Green College Dining Society invites event attendees to stay on for dinner to continue the conversation in the dining hall next door to the Coach House. Meal tickets are available for $25 for non-students and $20 for students and must be reserved by noon the previous day (November 19th) using this Google form. Each meal includes meat and vegetarian options, and most dietary preferences can be accommodated.
The UBC School of Creative Writing is providing several fully subsidized tickets for UBC students for each event. If you’re a UBC creative writing student (at any level), sign up here to receive an email inviting you to express interest. Bronwen will email a few days before each event to see who’s available/interested and distribute meal reservations.
Upcoming Events in the Series
A Community Reading on April 2, 2025—details to come!
Warm best from your hosts,
Bronwen Tate and Elee Kraljii Gardiner