Diane Seuss' 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. The first section of this collection pays homage to the poet's roots in a place where the world hands you nothing and promises less, so you are left to invent yourself or disappear. From there these poems both recount and embody repeated acts of defiant self-creation in the face of despair, loss, and shame, and always in the shadow of annihilation. With...
Diane Seuss' poems grow out of the fertile soil of southwest Michigan, bursting any and all stereotypes of the Midwest and turning loose characters wo...
"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...
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
"Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer." --Laura Kasischke
