Nick Ripatrazone at Poetry Magazine:
In 2011, McSweeney coined the term necropastoral to describe a literary zone of “infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classic pastoral.” She identified writers in this tradition as Georges Bataille, Aimé Césaire, Leslie Scalapino, Kim Hyesoon, Christian Hawkey, and Wilfred Owen, whose “bad writing” Yeats deplored. She might also have included herself. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014), McSweeney’s collection of critical essays, is an illuminating companion to Toxicon and for her approach to Keats more broadly. The “definitive processes of the Necropastoral are decay, vagueness, interembodiment, fluidity, seepage, inflammation, supersaturation,” she writes.
The necropastoral is also an honest consideration of the natural life cycle: humans live, die, and are often interred in the ground to settle with the soil.
more here.