FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRYFINALIST FOR THE 2024 HEARTLAND BOOKSELLERS AWARD FOR POETRYDiane 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
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.
Diane 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 suffer
Diane Seuss’s brilliant follow-up to Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for PoetryStill life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned DreamsicleStill life with Easte
"Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer." --Laura KasischkeFor, having imagined your body one way I found it to be another way, it was yielding,but only as the Destroy