Modern Poetry

Starred review from December 18, 2023
Seuss (Frank: Sonnets) lends her mordant wit and incisive vision to this poetry-focused sixth collection. Her deadpan levity refuses piousness, even as she deals head-on with a feeling of being “never again at home in the world” and a sense that “I have camped/ at this outpost my whole life.” Seuss’s comic talent bristles and undercuts sentimentality. She comments as she goes, often on the very construction and thoughts which drive her “breathless/ deathless, feckless little song.” There is an urge toward self-laceration in these pages (“I looked like a Rubens/ painting of a woman half-eaten/ by moths”), but she applies these same unsparing, scalpel-like strokes to “the murdered world” and to poetry itself. There are several essayistic poems discussing craft and the artistry of verse: “There is a poetry of rage and a poetry of hope,” she notes, while refusing to settle for easy platitude. “Who wants anyone/ else’s hands on their pain?” she asks, challenging simplistic self-help solutions. “Don’t be the savior, be the stain.” These irreverent, pulsing, and defiant poems are full of dangerous good sense.

Starred review from June 1, 2024

In her follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning frank: sonnets, Seuss assesses the nature and value of poetry by purveying beautifully hard-edged plainspokenness to capture aspects of her life. She recalls her upbringing in a "desolate town," her working-class background ("My class. Its itches and psychological riches"), and her "unscholarliness" and sense of unbelonging in the larger world even as she scrapes along. Yet she tells herself not to live some former life or self: "There is no going back." Yes, there is something to be claimed from the past--"how and where you are made"--but memory is "Only instruction. Not a dwelling." And what remarkable instruction Seuss gives. Talking both to herself and to readers, as if they were potential writers, she uses the title poem to assay her discovery of poetry, then plumbs what poetry does best--not lecture or meaning-making ("in a gale, ...the first thing to go") but depth of feeling and concreteness of experience; ever exuberant, she's "homesick for life" and "more interested / in the particular / nature and tenor of the energy / of our trouble" than any specific plaint. The result is unputdownable. VERDICT A highly recommended volume that can be equally appreciated by dedicated poetry readers and those for whom it might be that rare reading of verse.

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