Diane Seuss

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

from I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise

mia sønderskov

i have lived in a painting called paradise, and even the bad parts were beautiful

on the hillside is Moon Cemetery, where the tombstones are hobnailed or prismed like cut-glass bowls, and some are shaped so precisely like the trunks of trees that birds build their nests in the crooks of their granite limbs (…)

(…) for it is a cemetery named after a moon and moons never stay put

some say it’s hell, and some say just another, bolder paradise

C. worry, the little sister in dress-up clothes, believing if she’s only alert enough she can detoxify the snake

you’ll always be in pain, / the doctor said, and yes, my legs would tell you / if they could talk, it’s true

There isn’t a Holiday Inn Express that can save me. Not a flight to St. Louis, which my granddad called Sink Louis, not even a flight to Los Angeles (…)

if we are children, we’re bare and unashamed, our hands on our hips, until we are shamed. like you, we enter the store. like you, we exit

he’s reading war and peace again, but this time from back to front, and so he refers to it, in his mind, as peace and war

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl quotes

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