A resplendent life in sonnets from the author of Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Diane Seuss is the author of four poetry collections, including Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Michigan.
"Seuss transforms 'tragic spectacle' into something beautiful,
visionary, 'revolting and grand.'"--The Nation
"This book is a response to death, a way of living in knowledge of
death's privations. . . . What Seuss is hoping for is an extended
enough death to allow for a witty recognition of the shape it is
imposing on the life it ends. Beyond that, though, what she wants
is enough life to make her death into a kind of 'last rhyme', a
sound that radiates both into the past and into the future, where
it might make contact with your body, or mine."--Kamran
Javadizadeh, London Review of Books "Seuss layers the work with a
litany of cultural and literary references . . . It is at that
bright, fascinating collision between tradition and innovation that
these poems reside."--Soft Punk Magazine
"The whole book is . . . barbed and artful, dramatizing both
Seuss's writing life and her life-life, staking out a territory for
the reader to look at and admire but never to control or
own."--Poetry Foundation
"frank: sonnets feels very close to writing; it is a heady,
intoxicating experience. Seuss understands the labor of a sonnet's
particular space--the intensity and the balance, the anaphora and
the rhyme that can gallop wild inside the sonnet's field."--The
Rumpus "This is a writer whose pleasure in building language knocks
you over and makes you feel some responsive pleasure..."--Women's
Review of Books
"Seuss is at her most moving and morally attuned..."--Harvard
Review "The lightning intelligence of Diane Seuss's poems strikes
equally the lavish external world and the harrowed interior. A
brilliant and devastating account of the making and survival of a
poet, frank: sonnets has a relentless, lambent urgency; by its
final pages I had to remind myself to breathe."--Garth Greenwell
"In frank: sonnets Diane Seuss has written an ambitious, searing,
and capacious life story. . . . Another collection that staggers,
one that makes mastery seem effortless, one that's honest, true,
gorgeously frank."--Traci Brimhall "Every poem in frank: sonnets is
an example of the incomparable Seussian Sonnet. . . . Acute,
resolute, buoyant, and unflinching, frank rings loudest as a
synonym for candor, so much do these poems feel tethered to a real
life, a real world, simultaneously grounded and spiritual, verbal
and existential, with resonances of the blues."--Terrance Hayes
"Good lord. I've rarely read a book that feels so intimate, so
spoken. I've rarely read a book that makes me feel so spoken to. So
with. These are poems born of a kind of wrought faith that, despite
all the breaking, language still might bring us closer to each
other, and closer to ourselves. Diane Seuss's frank: sonnets shares
that faith with us. And goddamn, I am so grateful for that."--Ross
Gay
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