Diane Seuss | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1956-05-26)May 26, 1956 (age 68) Michigan City, Indiana |
| Occupation | poet, educator |
| Education | |
| Notable works | frank: sonnets |
| Notable awards | |
Diane Seuss (born 1956) is an American poet and educator.[1] Her bookfrank: sonnets won thePulitzer Prize for Poetry and theNational Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022.[2]
She was born inMichigan City, Indiana and grew up inMichigan inEdwardsburg andNiles. Seuss received a BA fromKalamazoo College and an MSW fromWestern Michigan University.[1][3]
She taught at Kalamazoo College from 1988 until 2016. In 2012, she was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English atColorado College.[3] She has been a visiting professor atUniversity of Michigan andWashington University in St. Louis.
Seuss is a2020 Guggenheim Fellow. In 2021 she received the John Updike Award from theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters.
Her poetry has appeared inGulf Coast,TheMissouri Review,Poetry, andThe New Yorker, among others. Her bookFour-Legged Girl was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl was a finalist for theNational Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.
Reviews of Seuss's work often note her technical acumen. Writing aboutfrank: sonnets in theWomen's Review of Books,Laurie Stone notes "More than anything, it strikes me, she loves the individual sentence and line."[4]Los Angeles Times reviewerVictoria Chang says that Seuss is "writing some of the most animated and complex poetry today,"[5] and goes on to write
In an age where poetry can so easily be simplified into small one-dimensional sound bites to share on Instagram or Twitter, Seuss's poems aspire to complicate, drawing connections between seemingly unrelated things, flowing in and out and back and away from their initial triggers.[5]
Publishers Weekly called Seuss's writing "endlessly inventive with her language and feats of imagination."[6]
Seuss's third collection,Four Legged Girl, is "concerned with loss," including the deaths of her father and of a former lover, but also addresses "importance of living in the present," writes Marybeth Rua-Larsen.[7] She goes on "InFour-Legged Girl, Seuss not only turns the common associations of flowers as gentle and delicate things easily damaged into symbols of strength and aggression but does so with energy, inventiveness, and a wildness that is incapable of being tamed."
In theAmerican Poetry Review,Margaree Little addresses the collection's title, which refers toMyrtle Corbin, a Victorian-era person who was born with four legs, and who appears on the cover of the book.[8] Seuss begins and ends the book with works taking inspiration from Corbin.[7] Little writes that Seuss's poems are "borne of traumas" and sees Corbin as a mirror of Seuss's self-identification "as a spectacle, an exhibit, a performance."[8]
Writing forThe Rumpus, Ellen Mack-Miller notes a sense ofanimism inFour-Legged Girl, writing "Seuss animates. Objects come alive, like toys springing from a chest when darkness comes."[9]Four Legged Girl was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize; the nomination called the collection "a gallery of incisive and beguiling portraits and landscapes."[10]
Seuss's collection 'Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks' takes its title from the Rembrandt painting of the same name, and each section of the collection begins with an image derived from the painting.[5] Other poems references paintingsVincent van Gogh,Georgia O'Keefe,Mark Rothko, andJackson Pollock among others.[11] Reviewer Laurie Stone writes that the poems' use of painting allows them to "freeze time" and makes them a "lab for experiments with language, rough emotions, and the indeterminacy of feeling."[12]Los Angeles Times reviewer Victoria Chang describes the effect of Seuss's use of painting to frame her poems: "By the end of the book, we see how a painting (and the speaker's life) have become so much more because we have taken the painting (and life) apart and expanded each fragment.... art, in particular still life art, is anything but useless."[5]
frank: sonnets comprises 128 poems, allsonnets. Critic Laurie Stone sees Seuss's use of poetic form as a metaphor: "A sonnet is like a trapped body: all physical limits and nowhere to run but inside the lyrical imagination. Fourteen lines, again and again."[13]
Critic Meryl Natchez writes that
The Pulitzer Prize committee describedfrank: sonnets as "a virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America, including the beauty and the difficulty of working-class life in the Rust Belt."[15]
Seuss's 2024 collection,Modern Poetry, was a finalist for theNational Book Award for Poetry.[16] It was also one of theNew York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024.[17]
One poem in the collection, "Romantic Poet," was featured in an article byNew York Times criticA. O. Scott under the headline "Will You Fall in Love With This Poem? I Did." In it, Scott offers a close reading of Seuss's poem, which itself considers famedRomantic poetJohn Keats. Scott sees in the poem an "unromantic, prosaic, crude" physical description of a "stinky, runty, manifestly unlovable poet" paired with praise for his "immaculate art." He concludes "Keats himself, made real in Seuss’s poem — a living, embodied presence she cannot help loving, in spite of whatever unpleasantness her scholar friend might reveal about him. That’s true romance."[18]
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2001–2025) | ||
|---|---|---|
| .png) | |
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
