Joyelle McSweeney's collections of poetry include The Red Bird (2002), winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poetry Series, The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004), Percussion Grenade (2012), Toxicon and Arachne (2020), a finalist for the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Award, and Death Styles (2024). She is also the author of the novels Nyland, the Sarcographer (2007) and Flet (2007); the prose work Salamandrine, 8 Gothics (2013); the critical volume Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014); and the verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks (2014), awarded the inaugural Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (2020), winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation. Her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Literature Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry.

In an interview, McSweeney described what she called her “magpie-aesthetic,” apparent in The Red Bird, noting that “even when I’m not writing with overtly found materials, I think my brain works on language the same way—selecting, assembling, sounding out complexes and runs.” Matthew Henriksen commented on this technique in a review of The Commandrine and Other Poems: “Perspectives may diverge and take hold of their own visions. . . . McSweeney treats words, like images, as instances of their precise contents rather than symbolic references.”

Of Toxicon and Arachne, Dan Chiasson wrote, "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… The kamikaze fantasy arises, like everything in this frightening and brilliant book, not from a pleasant ‘brainstorm’ but from the animal reflexes of the ‘brainstem.’ The defeat is total: a rout, a blowout. Now that the tables have been permanently turned, ‘the popsong plays’ on ‘the toy turntable’ in the nursery and also—you can hear the faint pun—'in eternity.’”

With Johannes Göransson, Joyelle McSweeney cofounded Action Books, a press that publishes poetry and books in translation, pubishing such authors and translators as Raúl Zurita, Kim Hyesoon, Josué Guébo, Hiromi Itō, Don Mee Choi, and Daniel Borzutzky. She teaches at the University of Notre Dame.