Percussion Grenade

Music and drama as weapons of productive destruction. This collection by prize-winning, massively influential literary star Joyelle McSweeney explodes the twinned and dangerous notions that images are pretty, and that they land predictably. Power struggles in all contexts and the driving ever-presence of a lexicon of puissance make this a bracing read, not for the faint of heart or mind.

From "Guadaloop":

Just inside the cutters' pavilion

Just at the peak of the oxygen tent

Just on the inner lid of the hairline coma

Just on the inner thighs of the medical canal

Just up under the gesso of lubrication

Just up to the hairline of the hairline crack

Just there where the adolescent girl eyes the camera

Just under the burden of her fishscale hair

Just where one sister shoulders the other

Just why should one sister have to shoulder the other

Just while out of the frame the globe unshouldered rolls around like a boulder in the mouth

Just the whole world like a wadded-up burden in the mouth

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of five books, including The Red Bird, chosen by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. McSweeney is a co-founder of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-quarterly for international writing and hybrid forms, and a contributing editor of the culture blog montevidayo.com. She holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and the Iowa Writers Workshop, and is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Notre Dame.