Niina Pollari / Sadreads: "[Joyelle] McSweeney, maximalist queen, has long been a favorite, but the conceit of Death Styles rang especially true for me. It’s a follow-up to her masterwork of grief, Toxicon & Arachne, and for it, McSweeney gave herself a prompt to write every day, to “accept any inspiration presented to me as an artifact of the present tense, however incidental, embarrassing, or fleeting,” and to “follow the flight of that inspiration for as far as it would take me[.]” The result is a collection of poems that finds an entry point in anything — a raccoon, River Phoenix, Mary Shelley, a hospital planter — and follows it into a space where grief continues its metamorphosis; the speaker’s resentful survival is an extended metaphor. “I count the banded warblers / tap the safety glass / and wait for the laws of heaven / to drop on me like a safe”. This collection showed me a way to grasp onto anything, and make it a style. More than any other this year, it made me want to write."