Words mean a great deal to novelists. They mean everything to poets. Working in the space between are those writers transitioning between mediums — where poesy is refigured into prose through the treacherous task of anchoring verbal flights of fancy with thick narrative ballast while maintaining the velocity of sound, sense, and syllable. With the back-to-back publication of the novels Nylund, The Sarcographer and Flet, poet Joyelle McSweeney may now be counted and even esteemed among such wordsmiths, as her novels represent not merely an attempt to cross the chasm between poetry and prose but a bridge slung to span the divide. But in fashioning novels more enamored of self-conscious language than plot and character, McSweeney’s triumph possesses a half life as short and ephemeral as her own verbal ingenuities.

In Nylund, McSweeney forays into the mind of a self-described lug, a practitioner of the fabulated art of “sarcography” whereby one comprehends the world through its surfaces. The term owes a nod to Jeffrey Ford’s The Physiognomist: deriving an ornate mental gestalt from the tactile impression of a simple object, such as the austere etchings of a sarcophagus or the artless contours of a face. Sarcophagus means “flesh eater” in Greek; rendered literally, sarcography, thus, means “flesh writing,” baroquely evoking the image of Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, whose tattoos herald what is and what will be.

Nylund explains his gift as a sort of telepathy, but the reader detects traces of schizophrenia: walking down the street in a downpour he is “a sarcographer of raining. I had to build a cask around it, built like itself.” When he is fired from a newspaper for hoarding readers’ letters, he describes how in his basement he would “place [his] hands on one and read its innards like an ancient roman.” After a night of troubled dreams — “the sheets’ sarcography” — he stumbles into a world of noir familiars: men in trench coats, tough guys, kidnappings, and a dead dame. McSweeney even gives a tip of the fedora to Chandler’s signature metaphorical descriptive style: “Nylund breathed for a moment before willing himself to separate from the shadow which put its hands on his cheeks and kissed his face.”

Yet her primary interest is not plot, which she props up only as a backdrop to Nylund’s involute psychology, twisted by the disappearance of a twin sister some years past. The mysteries converge in Nylund’s mind, if never in events, a structure reminiscent of Paul Auster’s post-modern noir classic The New York Trilogy. Metamorphosed, Nylund is “huge and furious, his carapace big as the sky’s. He shoved his feelers in his mouth then vomited out a thick beam of blackness.” Later, when employed as a floor-room polisher in a department store pushing the dubious Christmas theme of “Household Murders,” Nylund “nestled in the polish fumes and feeling the flexible chamois glide ... felt his mind itself stretch and bend in sarcography. An entirely unhumanoid consciousness, without even the shape of mind, running, dribbling, flooding, bounding, bouncing, collecting and pooling across a series of cool and curving places.”

McSweeney strings playful, but dark, puns (“Call me Caul”) and intense imagery (“The gravel driveway curved away like a uterus and the Mister and the Missus were born through the threshold and into the house”) to stitch together these moments of reverie. Readers expecting a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe should revise their expectations: if William Faulkner had written a noir from the perspective of Benjy Compson, the mentally damaged simpleton from The Sound and the Fury, he would have produced a specimen not very different from Nylund.