Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets (2021), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018); Four-Legged Girl (2015), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010), winner of the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry; and It Blows You Hollow (1998). Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988. Seuss earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University. Source

Excerpt from “frank: sonnets” [Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me]

Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me. I didn’t want it.

Believe me, I didn’t want it anymore. Who in their

right mind? And then it came like an ice cream truck

with its weird tinkling music, its sweet frost. I fled

to the shore and saw how death-strewn, all the body

parts washed up and sucked clean like that floor mosaic

by Sosus of Pergamon, Unswept House. Seabirds

flocked and dematerialized like they do. Bees raged

at their own dethroning. Love came close anyway,

found me out, its warped music all the rage. It had

a way, just by being in proximity, of opening

the shells of the bivalves. Disclosing their secret

meat. One doesn’t really suck on frozen sugar water.

One allows it to melt in the oven of the mouth.

Published:

2021

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Love & Relationships

Poetic Form