Poetry by Diane Seuss

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

"Death, class, gender, and art are among the entwined preoccupations in this marvelous, complex, attractive, frightening book, which allows life to spill out of the frames of the artworks providing occasions for the poems. Ekphrasis (art about art) in Seuss's wonderfully flexible syntax, with her linguistic pizazz and startling juxtapositions, removes boundaries between living and dying. paradise and hell, made things and lived things. " - Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review

"Throughout this rich collection, the speaker uses art to show how women and the lower class have been portrayed and framed, so to speak, by social norms and expectations. She challenges long-held ideas about worth, privileges, and beauty, and creates an alternative landscape through self-portraits and gothic still lifes...The poems, ranging from darkly challenging to direct and moving, require readers to levitate above their own assumptions and embrace a world that is, in many ways, 'a paradise of vagaries'" - Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post.

110 pages of pure gold! WakeUpAndLive~doingNaNo'24

Forty-Five Poems, another masterpiece of the author of Four-legged Girl (2015), finalist of the Pulitzer Prize.

I was in awe by her first collection of poetry, I am more so with this one. She matured and found her genius style in poetry. There is no one like her.

Art, Poetry, Life, and Death, what more is there? She deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature, as far as I'm concerned!

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018) by Diane Seuss

She comes out of the dark seeking pie, but instead finds two dead peacocks.
One is strung up by its feet. The other lies on its side in a pool
of its own blood. The girl is burdened with curly bangs. A too-small cap.
She wanted pie, not these beautiful birds. Not a small, dusky apple
from a basket of dusky apples. Reach in. Choose a dusky apple.
She sleepwalked to this window, her body led by its hunger for pie.
Instead, this dead beauty, gratuitous. Scalloped green feathers. Gold breast.
Iridescent-eyed plumage, supine on the table. Two gaudy growns.
She rests her elbows on the stone windowsill. Why not pluck a feather?
Why lean against the gold house of the rich and stare at the bird's dead eye?
The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it.
Build a fire on the riverbank. Tear away the beautiful feathers.
Suck scorched, tough, dark meat off of hollow bones. Look at her, ready to reach.
She'd hoped for pie. Meringue beaded gold. Art, useless as tits on a boar.

Seuss created this poem by watching Rembrandt's painting of the same name.