TOXICON & ARACHNE is a a raw, personal and indelible double volume of extraordinary lyric poetry, at once thrilling and sinister, by 'one of poetry's most versatile experimentalists' (Publisher's Weekly)

'Joyelle McSweeney is a poet with a vocation - a calling to the world. What is given her (the vocation) is to make others see what is given her to see' Allen Grossman

'The power of McSweeney's work cannot be separated from its association with forms of oracle and soothsaying, and so it is uncanny that it should arrive in the middle of a global pandemic... Frightening and brilliant' Dan Chiasson, New Yorker

'I am in deep awe of the resilience found in these pages, and the enduring strength and clarity these poems expel forth' Prageeta Sharma

'Formally brilliant, emotionally heartbreaking, and considerably terrifying, this is a stunning work from one of poetry's most versatile experimentalists' Publishers Weekly Starred Review

'McSweeney is one of our most dynamic poets of theme, mood, and syntax, and this new paired collection unifies those ranges in a most powerful fashion' Nick Ropatrazone, The Millions

'McSweeney is much more formally inclined ? the book contains a crown of sonnets and two sestinas, perhaps the only good sestinas I've ever read. In the free verse poems too, sound and rhythm are the governing principles, with deeper connections almost feeling like a bonus to the surface pleasure of the sonic riffing' Elisa Gabbert, New York Times

'I've never read anything by Joyelle McSweeney that wasn't totally exciting. She's one of the most interesting people working now in terms of the forms she uses and she's extremely deft, and playful, and yet the stuff that's going on, content-wise, is really super-smart. Thrilling' Dennis Cooper

'Biological, morbid, fanatic, surreal, McSweeney's impulses are to go to the rhetoric of the maternity mythos by evoking the spooky, sinuous syntaxes of the gothic and the cleverly constructed political allegory' Carmen Giménez Smith

'This necessary, inventive lassoing-in of reality as we are presently experiencing it leaves no one "clean" or in the clear' Claudia Rankine