Percussion Grenade: Poems & Plays

Joyelle McSweeney: Joyelle McSweeney is the author of five books: The Necropastoral (Spork Press, 2011), an artist's book of essays and poems featuring collages by Andrew Shuta; the hybrid novels Flet (Fence, 2008) and Nylund the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007); and the poetry volumes The Commandrine and Other Poems (Fence, 2004) and The Red Bird, which was chosen by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. She also translates the Aeneid. McSweeney's prose, poetry, drama and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poetry, American Letters and Commentary, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, How2, Jubilat, Conduit, Lamination Colony, and elsewhere, and are featured in such anthologies as My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin 2010) and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande 2006). McSweeney is a co-founder of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-quarterly for international writing and hybrid forms, as well as a contributing editor of the collective culture blog montevidayo.com. McSweeney's essays on such topics as poetry, art, translation, genre, media, and pedagogy have appeared or are forthcoming in pamphlet form from Ugly Duckling Presse, in journals including New American Writing, Cross Cultural Poetics, and boundary2, in anthologies, such as Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook from the University of Iowa Press, and in on-line blogs, websites and zines. Review essays regularly appear in Rain Taxi, American Book Review, The Boston Review, and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame.

Rat-a-tat prosody and scattershot, hallucinatory cultural critique, replete with grotesqueries, spit baroquely from the necropastoral ground of McSweeney's third collection.