DEATH STYLES
Joyelle McSweeney
Nightboat Books, 2024
I don’t know how it is that I know I’m not a great father. I’m not sure what I language. I bathe my 15 year old son or I tell my other sons to do it because my back hurts. This is enough non-fiction to be true.
‘like a star you fail to hide behind your signal’
‘the sea doesn’t even wait around to hear itself’
To write toward Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles feels rude. Loss is boring. This isn’t about loss. What a surging patience. What a hidden stoking of the white fire that depletes nothingness. What an interrogation of the silence that silences the math of quietude. This work is such that it might bring about, or deliver?, time. Time can’t have kids, but can’t keep itself from trying. Time gifts itself a lengthy privacy. I don’t know what time is to you, but do know what you are to time. Is there an aftermath of during? A before-death of being? I want to cry and do. I don’t want to cry and do. McSweeney watches what looks. Inventories the constant. What a locating work. Disorientation is in the right place at the right…well, fuck. Keep this work close. It goes the extra subtraction.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
kingsoftrain 
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