Diane Seuss

A resplendent life in sonnets from the author of Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without,” Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cels on a filmstrip, frank: sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of “beauty or relief.” Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and—in a word—frank.

frank: sonnets

This volume of poetry takes its title from Rembrandt's painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer's troubled gaze. The collection shatters the notion of a still life, and presents the painting in pieces. With invention and irreverence, the poems escape their gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Details from this gallery of lives in shards hide more than they reveal, like fragmented memories, waiting until they are reassembled into a whole.

Poems

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

Diane Seuss’s signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor. In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time’s deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? “It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem,” Seuss writes. “You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made.” What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.

Modern Poetry

"Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer." —Laura Kasischke For, having imagined your body one way I found it to be another way, it was yielding, but only as the Destroying Angel mushroom yields, its softness allied with its poison, and your legs were not petals or tendrils as I'd believed, but brazen, the deviant tentacles beneath the underskirt of a secret queen —from "Oh four-legged girl, it's either you or the ossuary" In Diane Seuss's Four-Legged Girl, her audacious, hothouse language swerves into pain and rapture, as she recounts a life lived at the edges of containment. Ghostly, sexy, and plaintive, these poems skip to the tune of a jump rope, fill a wishing well with desire and other trinkets, and they remember past lush lives in New York City, in rural Michigan, and in love. In the final poem, she sings of the four-legged girl, the body made strange to itself and to others. This collection establishes Seuss's poetic voice, as rich and emotional as any in contemporary poetry.

Four-Legged Girl

Winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Seuss's poems grow out of the fertile soil of southwest Michigan, bursting any and all stereotypes of the Midwest and turning loose characters worthy of Faulkner in their obsession, their suffering, their dramas of love and sex and death.

Diane Seuss

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