Staff Pick
Diane Seuss’s fourth collection could easily find a place on an exhibit wall right alongside the paintings that inspired many of her poems, as it deserves just as much time for contemplation and appreciation. As in her previous collection, Seuss brings to bear her whole wealth of experience, from childhood to the present, as well as a mind eminently suited to finding the weird and the wonderful in art and art history. Her influences are here, too: Dickinson’s truth told slant; Ginsberg’s howling, at once communal and lonely; Whitman’s joyous invitation; and Williams’s reality completed, not hidden, by imagination. I’d say she deserves to sit at the table with this pantheon of American poets, but I get the sense that she’s already claimed her seat, and says hi for them. These poems are dense the way a child's summer's day is dense, bittersweet and infinite, full of loss and discovery — truly an amazing collection. Recommended By Jordan M., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Diane Seuss's brilliant follow-up to Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Still life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned Dreamsicle
Still life with Easter Bunny twenty caged minks and rusty meat grinder
Still life with whiskey wooden leg two potpies and a dead parakeet
Still life with pork rinds pickled peppers and the Book of Revelation
Still life with feeding tube oxygen half-eaten raspberry Zinger
Still life with convenience store pecking order shotgun blast to the face
--from "American Still Lives"
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt's painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer's own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss's new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt's painting is presented across the book in pieces--details that hide more than they reveal until they're assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish--the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O'Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that "our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting."
Review
“Lyrical, lusty, art-centric. . . . Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl is as much about running as it is about standing still, and as much about confronting death as it is about rediscovering life. . . . A kinetic art walk rich in observation, curiosity, reverence and impudence.” Shelf Awareness
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, privilege and beauty, and creates an alternative landscape through self-portraits and Gothic still lifes.” The Washington Post
Review
“[A] marvelous, complex, attractive, frightening book.” The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Diane Seuss's brilliant follow-up to Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Still life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned Dreamsicle
Still life with Easter Bunny twenty caged minks and rusty meat grinder
Still life with whiskey wooden leg two potpies and a dead parakeet
Still life with pork rinds pickled peppers and the Book of Revelation
Still life with feeding tube oxygen half-eaten raspberry Zinger
Still life with convenience store pecking order shotgun blast to the face
--from "American Still Lives"
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt's painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer's own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss's new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt's painting is presented across the book in pieces--details that hide more than they reveal until they're assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish--the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O'Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that "our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting."
About the Author
Diane Seuss is the author of four poetry collections, including Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize. She lives in Michigan.