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Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
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.”
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.”
120 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2018
35 people are currently reading
715 people want to read
About the author
Diane Seuss
26 books234 followersDiane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. She earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University. 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews
September 6, 2022
Why did I find this one so underwhelming? I liked how the poems try to engage with all kinds of art, both high and low, and how Diane Seuss superimposes these real-world, mundane (and, as other critics have previously noted, often grotesque) scenes on notorious, canonical Western artworks. However, I would’ve appreciated it even more if this dialogue between the text, the self & other artistic media would have been… more grounded in the present? This was written in 2018 and I can only bear to read so much poetry alluding to Whitman, Rothko, Williams Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and the like.
Still Life with Turkey
The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot,
the cord binding it just below the stiff trinity
of toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyes
are in love with it as they are in love with all
dead things that cannot escape being looked at.
It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my
father was there in his black casket and could not
elude our gaze. I was a child so they asked
if I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?”
[…]
Still Life with Turkey
The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot,
the cord binding it just below the stiff trinity
of toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyes
are in love with it as they are in love with all
dead things that cannot escape being looked at.
It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my
father was there in his black casket and could not
elude our gaze. I was a child so they asked
if I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?”
[…]
Read
July 19, 2018If you are a fan of both poetry and painting, this collection will no doubt appeal to you. It's rich with a lot of poems, most all of them descriptions of still lives or of lives of various painters or of how Seuss's life itself can be described with painter detail.
Here is an example poem:
Silence Is So Accurate, Rothko Wrote
Accurate like an arrow without a target
and no target in mind.
Silence has its own roar or, not-roar,
just as Rothko wrote “I don’t express myself
in my paintings. I express my not-self.”
A poem that expresses the not-self.
Everything but the self.
The meadow’s veil of fog, but is veil self-referential?
Already, dawn, the not-birds alert to what silence has to offer.
The fog, one of Rothko’s shapes,
hanging there in the not-self, humming.
Mikel, before he died, loved Rothko most.
When he could still think, he put his mind
to those sorts of judgments.
If I pull the fog away like theater curtains, what then?
Sadness shapes the landscape.
The arrow of myself thwacks the nearest tree.
Fog steps closer like a perpetrator or a god.
Oh. I’m weeping.
Tears feed the silence like a mother drops
into her baby not-bird’s open beak
some sweet but dangerous morsel.
Here is an example poem:
Silence Is So Accurate, Rothko Wrote
Accurate like an arrow without a target
and no target in mind.
Silence has its own roar or, not-roar,
just as Rothko wrote “I don’t express myself
in my paintings. I express my not-self.”
A poem that expresses the not-self.
Everything but the self.
The meadow’s veil of fog, but is veil self-referential?
Already, dawn, the not-birds alert to what silence has to offer.
The fog, one of Rothko’s shapes,
hanging there in the not-self, humming.
Mikel, before he died, loved Rothko most.
When he could still think, he put his mind
to those sorts of judgments.
If I pull the fog away like theater curtains, what then?
Sadness shapes the landscape.
The arrow of myself thwacks the nearest tree.
Fog steps closer like a perpetrator or a god.
Oh. I’m weeping.
Tears feed the silence like a mother drops
into her baby not-bird’s open beak
some sweet but dangerous morsel.
July 4, 2018
In this poetry collection, Seuss examines pieces of art, often still life paintings, and relates them to the varied experiences of every day life in our modern world. Pictures of sadness and struggle are forged from observations on famous art and artists. A moving collection.
March 21, 2018
Seuss, in STILL LIFE WITH TWO DEAD PEACOCKS AND A GIRL, dares to attempt the reconciliation of the quotidian and the sublime. That endeavor means the collection is inherently courageous; the fact that it succeeds at such a feat makes it a revelatory one. In ambitious, music-driven lines, Seuss calls forth a mosaic of arts and an array of familiar characters (some better known than others: here you’ll find Emily Dickinson, Heimbach’s Woman Looking at A Table, Juan Sánchez Cotán, the braid of Sylvia Plath, Albrecht Dürer, and the sole of Janis Joplin’s shoe alongside a baby blanket, the addict Bunny, and the wanting customer with scars and dexatrim and frosted hair-- and you’ll love them all the same). As it breaks open the two-dimensional confines of a painting, so does STILL LIFE question our historical understandings of art. Unafraid to push art off its opulent, virgin altar, Seuss makes of the Walmart parking lot what Rembrandt made of his peacocks.
In a less capable hand, these ruminations might feel sterile. It is difficult to make relevant such things as art, opulence, splendor, color, and drama—to localize them, make them matter in our contemporary sociopolitical context. But harder still to make them intimate, resonant, aching. Luckily for Seuss, she knows just how to grasp onto the tail of language, to tug us into the blood-clotted mouth, the wounded melon, the “hands of a fly-by-night / magician” who says “Pick a card… Any card.” Hungrily, we’ll be Seuss’s witness. We’ll be the voyeur’s voyeur, watching (shamefully, erotically) as she watches the girl staring at a half-finished meal. We’ll be her “anonymous benefactor,” and we’ll be the light in the eye of the hare. We’ll let her “give [us] hope like a weird dessert whether [we] want it or not,” because when Seuss hands you poems this powerful, this throbbing, you must take to them like a feast.
In a less capable hand, these ruminations might feel sterile. It is difficult to make relevant such things as art, opulence, splendor, color, and drama—to localize them, make them matter in our contemporary sociopolitical context. But harder still to make them intimate, resonant, aching. Luckily for Seuss, she knows just how to grasp onto the tail of language, to tug us into the blood-clotted mouth, the wounded melon, the “hands of a fly-by-night / magician” who says “Pick a card… Any card.” Hungrily, we’ll be Seuss’s witness. We’ll be the voyeur’s voyeur, watching (shamefully, erotically) as she watches the girl staring at a half-finished meal. We’ll be her “anonymous benefactor,” and we’ll be the light in the eye of the hare. We’ll let her “give [us] hope like a weird dessert whether [we] want it or not,” because when Seuss hands you poems this powerful, this throbbing, you must take to them like a feast.
December 29, 2018
Ever since happening upon Diane Seuss's work online from Poem-A-Day at Poets.org , I've been a fan. Here's a poem if you haven't read her yet: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/toad
One of my students did her author study on Diane Seuss and read _Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl_, and I had been wanting to read it. Luckily, I found it at a local book store a few days before Christmas!
It is SUCH a gorgeous collection. I loved absolutely everything about it, including the structure. The opening and closing frame poems are perfect in the way they work. There are so many poems throughout the collection that I absolutely loved. "Bowl" blew me away, like existential crisis sobbing blew me away.
I can't wait to read the rest of her books.
One of my students did her author study on Diane Seuss and read _Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl_, and I had been wanting to read it. Luckily, I found it at a local book store a few days before Christmas!
It is SUCH a gorgeous collection. I loved absolutely everything about it, including the structure. The opening and closing frame poems are perfect in the way they work. There are so many poems throughout the collection that I absolutely loved. "Bowl" blew me away, like existential crisis sobbing blew me away.
I can't wait to read the rest of her books.
February 7, 2024
3.5! what a cool collection! loved that it was all centered on ekphrastic poems. i think the first half didn't connect with me as much, but the second half i did. i think i will like her other collection more so i'm excited to read that! definitely a force to be reckoned with!
March 7, 2026
Wonderful book. I liked this even more than the previous one, which was a runner-up for the Pulitzer.
Below is a short review I did of this
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
Diane Seuss
2018
Keith Taylor
In Rembrandt’s painting, “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl,” a child leans in the window, smiling, looking at everything the rich world has to offer her – including a bowl of fruit, and the two peacocks, one hanging upside down and one laid out on a kitchen table, ready for butchering. The only genuinely bright spot in the painting is the smear of blood running from underneath the second bird and dripping off the table. From our post-modern perspective the painting assumes its meaning as a comment on the very act of looking, on the making of art.
In the title poem to Diane Seuss’s new collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, the poet imagines that the child has come to the window sill looking for pie to steal or sample. Instead she is confronted with dead birds! That sense of disappointed expectations is one of the themes throughout this brilliant collection, as is the girl’s imagined response: “Why not pluck a feather?/Why lean against the gold house of the rich and stare at the bird’s dead eye?” The girl, the viewer, the poet is outside the house of the rich, but she knows what to do: “The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it./Build a fire on the riverbank. Tear away the beautiful feathers./Suck scorched, tough, dark meat off of hollow bones. Look at her, ready to reach.” Strength rises from that disappointment. There is ritual here, and it is sometimes violent and often out at the very edge of the emotional scale. The poem concludes with a Rilkean twist: “Art, useless as tits on a boar.”
In a note for the group of free sonnets this poem is part of, the poet tells us she learned this long 17 syllable line from Allen Ginsberg and his “American Sentences.” Ginsberg’s long line fits easily into the long lines that intrigue Seuss. In this new book, and her previous one, Four-Legged Girl, runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago, Seuss uses exuberant long lines to contain her wide-ranging imagination. Seuss riots in language, but there is not any easy adjectival or adverbial excess here. Rather she spins her syntactically rich sentences and her catalogues that try to capture something of the flow of the images and metaphors that must constantly be swimming through this poet’s head.
As the Rembrandt allusion in the title suggests, many of these poems are framed by paintings, although there is not an academic ekphrastic prompt in Seuss’s use of fine art. The poet’s appreciation of high art—usually considered a medium far removed from the poor, working class roots that Seuss writes about with devastating clarity—is hard earned. Seuss is always the girl at the window looking in at the still-life, and the poet relishes that role.
The book has several sequences of poems, and one of the most intriguing is a group of prose pieces after great American painters of the twentieth century collected under the overarching title “Walmart Parking Lot.” This poet does not let her readers forget where they are, even as she writes pieces after Pollack, Rothko, O’Keeffe and others. The Pollack piece gets the feel of the painting but in that Midwestern parking lot: “Frozen Coke splatter, and the disembodied sadness of the one who accidentally dropped it. Vomit-arc. Winding loops of coal tar sealant. Sparrows, too, have left their mark.”
In “Mark Rothko” the poor girl from southwestern Michigan takes the beat-up South Shore Railroad into Chicago to go to the museum that she will later write about. “The art, we saw, was good,” she writes. “We swallowed it down hungrily, without filter, like drinking water straight from the creek.” There’s a lot in that sentence about Seuss and the passions that motivate her art. The poet has a physical response to the art, and ingests it without cleaning it, without being told how to “consume” it, the way she would drink from the dirty creek behind her rural house. It’s a beautiful image of the desperate need for art that cuts across class in America. In its own way this is a cry of hope. At the end of the Rothko piece the poet takes the patterns of color from the museum back to her place: “We rode the swaying train home at sunset, the smokestacks of Gary shooting flames into a sky already changing orange. The city had been a dream. Home, too, a dream, black above, silver-gray below, floodlit by buzzing security lights.”
I've discovered in 2026 that this online journal no longer exists, so this might be the only place this review still lives.
(New York Journal of Books went out of business and their web site is no longer active)
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
Below is a short review I did of this
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
Diane Seuss
2018
Keith Taylor
In Rembrandt’s painting, “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl,” a child leans in the window, smiling, looking at everything the rich world has to offer her – including a bowl of fruit, and the two peacocks, one hanging upside down and one laid out on a kitchen table, ready for butchering. The only genuinely bright spot in the painting is the smear of blood running from underneath the second bird and dripping off the table. From our post-modern perspective the painting assumes its meaning as a comment on the very act of looking, on the making of art.
In the title poem to Diane Seuss’s new collection, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, the poet imagines that the child has come to the window sill looking for pie to steal or sample. Instead she is confronted with dead birds! That sense of disappointed expectations is one of the themes throughout this brilliant collection, as is the girl’s imagined response: “Why not pluck a feather?/Why lean against the gold house of the rich and stare at the bird’s dead eye?” The girl, the viewer, the poet is outside the house of the rich, but she knows what to do: “The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it./Build a fire on the riverbank. Tear away the beautiful feathers./Suck scorched, tough, dark meat off of hollow bones. Look at her, ready to reach.” Strength rises from that disappointment. There is ritual here, and it is sometimes violent and often out at the very edge of the emotional scale. The poem concludes with a Rilkean twist: “Art, useless as tits on a boar.”
In a note for the group of free sonnets this poem is part of, the poet tells us she learned this long 17 syllable line from Allen Ginsberg and his “American Sentences.” Ginsberg’s long line fits easily into the long lines that intrigue Seuss. In this new book, and her previous one, Four-Legged Girl, runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago, Seuss uses exuberant long lines to contain her wide-ranging imagination. Seuss riots in language, but there is not any easy adjectival or adverbial excess here. Rather she spins her syntactically rich sentences and her catalogues that try to capture something of the flow of the images and metaphors that must constantly be swimming through this poet’s head.
As the Rembrandt allusion in the title suggests, many of these poems are framed by paintings, although there is not an academic ekphrastic prompt in Seuss’s use of fine art. The poet’s appreciation of high art—usually considered a medium far removed from the poor, working class roots that Seuss writes about with devastating clarity—is hard earned. Seuss is always the girl at the window looking in at the still-life, and the poet relishes that role.
The book has several sequences of poems, and one of the most intriguing is a group of prose pieces after great American painters of the twentieth century collected under the overarching title “Walmart Parking Lot.” This poet does not let her readers forget where they are, even as she writes pieces after Pollack, Rothko, O’Keeffe and others. The Pollack piece gets the feel of the painting but in that Midwestern parking lot: “Frozen Coke splatter, and the disembodied sadness of the one who accidentally dropped it. Vomit-arc. Winding loops of coal tar sealant. Sparrows, too, have left their mark.”
In “Mark Rothko” the poor girl from southwestern Michigan takes the beat-up South Shore Railroad into Chicago to go to the museum that she will later write about. “The art, we saw, was good,” she writes. “We swallowed it down hungrily, without filter, like drinking water straight from the creek.” There’s a lot in that sentence about Seuss and the passions that motivate her art. The poet has a physical response to the art, and ingests it without cleaning it, without being told how to “consume” it, the way she would drink from the dirty creek behind her rural house. It’s a beautiful image of the desperate need for art that cuts across class in America. In its own way this is a cry of hope. At the end of the Rothko piece the poet takes the patterns of color from the museum back to her place: “We rode the swaying train home at sunset, the smokestacks of Gary shooting flames into a sky already changing orange. The city had been a dream. Home, too, a dream, black above, silver-gray below, floodlit by buzzing security lights.”
I've discovered in 2026 that this online journal no longer exists, so this might be the only place this review still lives.
(New York Journal of Books went out of business and their web site is no longer active)
https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book...
February 26, 2018
STILL LIFE WITH TWO DEAD PEACOCKS AND A GIRL is the memento mori of twenty-first century America, “like greeters at Walmart who are there to remind us that we, too, / will be greeters at Walmart.” Diane Seuss takes us by the hand and leads us through the paintings of Dürer and Pollock and Gijsbrechts, at which point we land squarely in a working class America peopled with characters that are “nostalgic / for a past that never happened.” These poems unveil the grotesqueness that is to be found in the margins of the academic, and in the shadows of high art⎯“Somewhere, juice runs / down a hairy chin, but that is well beyond the border of the box.” Voyeuristic and sensual and transcendent, her work shines a light behind the dumpster of life, and watches as the roaches skitter. As Seuss pays homage to the grit and gristle of life and art, so she offers her reader a stillness within this collection that is both death and life, and a wonder to behold.
June 21, 2021
THE LOVE IS HUGE!!! I'm reading everything she's written! YES! LOVE!
May 3, 2022
poetry collection that makes you google paintings so you understand the context of the poem. highlighted a lot from this, more than i expected. solid work
March 21, 2023
yea this one was hard as fuck to read. i could go a long time without having to read an ekphrastic poem
December 2, 2018
After reading Diane Suess's last collection (I think), The Four-Legged Girl, and not liking it (especially not liking it as much as I'd been led to believe I would like it), I knew I was taking a risk to try Suess again. I was lured in by a picture someone in my local or global writing community had posted on Instagram of a picture of one of the enclosed poems. The poem was the still life featuring Sylvia Plath's braid. Not only was I about to teach a creative writing workshop series titled, EMBODIED AUTUMN where I was actively seeking literary examples for the first sub theme Saturday, HAIR, I have long loved Plath (I am a proud member of her cult, the type of member that would piligrimage as do the women in Seuss's poem to go and see Sylvia's single brain behind glass in a museum or drool over it in a library archive). Furthermore, the poem was what I consider to be one of those rare perfect poems (it was indeed a still life), so I ordered the collection. Whereas I'd been annoyed by Seuss's "name-dropping" in The Four-Legged Girl, I read Still-Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl and felt like I was inside some dream museum with my favorite types of people looking at Art, together and alone we were experiencing it, climbing into the paintings, poems, portraits, and ultimately reversing the subject with the viewer and vice-versa. Translation: I fell in love with this book and as a result I fell in love with Diane Seuss.
August 12, 2024
I have lived in a painting called Paradise, and even the bad parts
were beautiful. There are fields of needles arranged into flowers,
their sharp ends meeting at the center, and from a distance the fields
full of needle flowers look blue from their silver reflecting the sky,
or white as lilies if the day is overcast, and there in the distance is a meadow
filled with the fluttering skirts of opium poppies. On the hillside
is Moon Cemetery, where the tombstones are hobnailed or prismed
like cut-glass bowls, and some are shaped so precisely like the trunks of trees
that birds build their nests in the crooks of their granite limbs, and some
of the graves are shaped like child-sized tables with stone tablecloths
and tea cups, yes, I have lived in a painting called Paradise.
...
Some say it is hell, and some say just another, bolder
paradise, and some say a dark wilderness, and some say an unswept
museum or library floor, and some say a long-lost love waits there
wearing bloody riding clothes, returned from war, and some say
freedom, which is a word that tastes strange, like a green plum.
-- "I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise"
were beautiful. There are fields of needles arranged into flowers,
their sharp ends meeting at the center, and from a distance the fields
full of needle flowers look blue from their silver reflecting the sky,
or white as lilies if the day is overcast, and there in the distance is a meadow
filled with the fluttering skirts of opium poppies. On the hillside
is Moon Cemetery, where the tombstones are hobnailed or prismed
like cut-glass bowls, and some are shaped so precisely like the trunks of trees
that birds build their nests in the crooks of their granite limbs, and some
of the graves are shaped like child-sized tables with stone tablecloths
and tea cups, yes, I have lived in a painting called Paradise.
...
Some say it is hell, and some say just another, bolder
paradise, and some say a dark wilderness, and some say an unswept
museum or library floor, and some say a long-lost love waits there
wearing bloody riding clothes, returned from war, and some say
freedom, which is a word that tastes strange, like a green plum.
-- "I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise"
May 19, 2018
Seuss' poetry is compelling to say the least. "Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl" isn't just about ekphrasis, although there is quite a bit of it in the collection. Seuss certainly takes bits and pieces from art history, and from still lives in particular, to rearrange the pieces and construct entirely new tableaux, but she also isn't afraid to start from scratch and build something entirely new, to turn real life scenes into paintings that are just as haunting and distorting as the details and events they capture. Her wording is so precise, so smooth, with such a perfected flow, that it's difficult not to immediately be pulled into these poems, even the ones that I didn't as fully understand or connect to. It is also worth mentioning that Seuss is one of those few poets who I think really masterfully uses beautiful imagery - lavish or even extraneous, if you will, things like peaches, blossoms, fabrics - with a newfound purpose. They are not simply beautiful words in her poems. They serve a purpose and attract the reader's attention to them without detracting, in turn, from the rest of the poem. I now need to acquire a copy of "Still Life" for myself - with the opening and closing poems that are linked and describe the unnamed speaker's life in and escape from a painting called "Paradise", Suess creates not just perfect individual pieces that are worth pouring over, but also weaves a powerful and tightly constructed narrative. This is a collection I'll remember and want to revisit for a long time to come.
February 4, 2019
Diane Seuss does something in this collection that was truly unexpected: write ekphrastic poetry that is largely unpredictable. Exploring the darker side of the portrayals of feminity, Suess has a gift for making one both amused and want to squirm, her ability to construct a tableau of women's' lives from the way artists portray them--weaving in Rembrandt, O'Keeffe, Pollock, and Rothko with parts of her speaker's lives. Further, Seuss thinks in structures and the book is structured very well including proper framing poems. Precise and beautiful.
September 12, 2018
Ms Seuss gleefully tramples any ideas I may have had as to the boundaries between poetry from prose. Even as this work serves as a collection of poems written and published separately, it functions as something unified, with parallels within each section and an overarching theme across the whole book succeeding at multiple levels. Ms Suess's wordcraft is moving, thought-provoking, and, with delightful frequency, truly hilarious.
April 3, 2019
I loved this poetry collection and the way it combines, or refuses to distinguish, high and low art. Seuss describes (real) still life paintings in the attentive detail the painters lavish on the fruit, flowers, and dead animals they depict, and combines that with the same attentive descriptions of everyday, middle American, life and death. Could anything be a better memento mori for the 21st century than the prospect of being a Walmart greeter?
December 20, 2018
Holy balls, this is an amazing collection of poems. It is wry and astute, commenting on the act of making art, while (obviously) also making art. It examines silence and stillness as twins, as elders, as our first/last homes. It is a marvel. Read it.
March 31, 2021
"From then on, inhabiting my body felt shameful, / like I’d been ejected from the Garden and was / sentenced to a life of peeing and wiping,"
no one is writing poems as delightfully strange as Diane Seuss
no one is writing poems as delightfully strange as Diane Seuss
December 8, 2019
oh, this book. It reminds me somehow of Brigit Pegeen Kelly - they couldn't be more different, but Seuss has that same beautiful inevitability. I was swept up in her voice. What a pleasure.
January 20, 2024
“Art, useless as tits on a boar.”
August 18, 2024
The ways in which embracing discomfort helps humans gain understanding of ourselves and of the lives and experiences of others is so often an underestimated or neglected experience.
In this collection, Seuss reminds how important it is not only to sit with the things that bring us discomfort but to seek them out - whether it is in art, in ourselves, or in each other- and lifts up the beauty in the overlooked spaces of paintings and people.
In this collection, Seuss reminds how important it is not only to sit with the things that bring us discomfort but to seek them out - whether it is in art, in ourselves, or in each other- and lifts up the beauty in the overlooked spaces of paintings and people.
August 11, 2018
This collection felt very different from her other works. Maybe that's not true, but that's how I felt. And, I suppose that was the whole point of this book. It may not be true, but the painter and the poet are out to make you feel, to connect, to recognize.
My favorite of all of these was the very first one, I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise, and I kept wanting more of that poem instead of the ones I was offered. As if she fed me dessert first, and the rest of the meal was too savory for my spoiled tongue.
This is a dense collection. I think you could take a whole year to explore it. I can see it being taught in lecture halls, brooded over by people much smarter than I am and more experienced with art. The ones I did know well enough gave a sense of pleasure at the recognition, and then enjoyment as I puzzled out how she saw the work and interpreted it. It was a nice muscle to stretch.
My favorite of all of these was the very first one, I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise, and I kept wanting more of that poem instead of the ones I was offered. As if she fed me dessert first, and the rest of the meal was too savory for my spoiled tongue.
This is a dense collection. I think you could take a whole year to explore it. I can see it being taught in lecture halls, brooded over by people much smarter than I am and more experienced with art. The ones I did know well enough gave a sense of pleasure at the recognition, and then enjoyment as I puzzled out how she saw the work and interpreted it. It was a nice muscle to stretch.
February 16, 2019
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. These poems are dense the way a child's summer's day is dense—bittersweet and infinite, full of discovery and loss. 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 to: 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 one gets the sense that she’s already claimed her seat, and says hi for them.
April 29, 2019
I finally made it through my mountain of library reservations, so I'm wading through the stack of purchased and gifted books that have accumulated over the years. There are several volumes of poetry among them, a genre I read less than most others. I found this collection to be good, but not amazing. I did really like the theme of fine art and painting throughout, and Seuss has some really lovely ways of verbally describing beautiful imagery. I think people who are deep into poetry would probably love this - it just didn't strike me deeply as a novice reader.
July 7, 2023
Seuss's interest in art goes beyond just writing about paintings. Yes, there is some form of ekphrasis in these poems, and while I'm not sure there is an actual settled definition of ekphrasis, I can confidently say what Seuss does with her writing about the art is more significant. In particular, I'm interested in the many references to trompe l'oeil. Because this optical illusion is more descriptive of Seuss's writing on art, and her ambition for the poems.
It's like how Mark Doty exploded the still life in his book Still Life with Oyster and Lemon. While still life paintings highlight a whole range of technical flourishes, there is something more that the painting implies. A finished meal. These sociable interactions. Pleasure. Sensuousness. And, with Doty, there's this way the sensuous experience implied by the painting's subject matter plays through the practice of painting it. And then, for Doty, how that draws his attention further into the painting.
For me, Seuss's energy and attention is similar to Doty. In the sense that the art amplifies and absorbs her attention. But where Doty uses the still life painting to think further into this time in his life, how his attention to the still life painting's details draws him further into personal details around his biography, or using details to better understand his biography, I would say Seuss's absorption into the painting relates more to distortion, or trained distortion of the materials. Like if a painting were even capable of depicting her life, it would likely consist of exaggeration, or placing someone like herself as a character incidental to the painting. So questions arise, like, "Who really is this person in the painting?" "What motives brought her to this moment?"
And it's from these types of questions that Seuss draws out her ekphrastic writing. And perhaps that aligns it with a more conventional definition of ekphrasis. But I feel like the conventional definition views the art as a fixed reference. And, in fact, its contained nature (what is actually visible in the frame) must be taken as sacrosanct. I mean, Auden's poem about Icarus just barely reaches out of the frame for its big moment. And I see Seuss questioning what paintings are supposed to even be. And whether most people are too precious about who these characters in the painting are, especially considering the different lives we all lead.
It's like how Mark Doty exploded the still life in his book Still Life with Oyster and Lemon. While still life paintings highlight a whole range of technical flourishes, there is something more that the painting implies. A finished meal. These sociable interactions. Pleasure. Sensuousness. And, with Doty, there's this way the sensuous experience implied by the painting's subject matter plays through the practice of painting it. And then, for Doty, how that draws his attention further into the painting.
For me, Seuss's energy and attention is similar to Doty. In the sense that the art amplifies and absorbs her attention. But where Doty uses the still life painting to think further into this time in his life, how his attention to the still life painting's details draws him further into personal details around his biography, or using details to better understand his biography, I would say Seuss's absorption into the painting relates more to distortion, or trained distortion of the materials. Like if a painting were even capable of depicting her life, it would likely consist of exaggeration, or placing someone like herself as a character incidental to the painting. So questions arise, like, "Who really is this person in the painting?" "What motives brought her to this moment?"
And it's from these types of questions that Seuss draws out her ekphrastic writing. And perhaps that aligns it with a more conventional definition of ekphrasis. But I feel like the conventional definition views the art as a fixed reference. And, in fact, its contained nature (what is actually visible in the frame) must be taken as sacrosanct. I mean, Auden's poem about Icarus just barely reaches out of the frame for its big moment. And I see Seuss questioning what paintings are supposed to even be. And whether most people are too precious about who these characters in the painting are, especially considering the different lives we all lead.
September 16, 2021
“Still life with convenience store pecking order shotgun blast to the face” (47)
Another beautifully odd and delightfully irreverent collection of poetry that looks out on life’s galleries, her masterpieces and contemplative still-lifes, her mastery of chiaroscuro and abstraction, and frantically searches for escape routes.
This collection challenges the gilded frames of art and the museum’s marble floors, confronts our notions of what “appreciation” for art entails and who is entitled to that appreciation. Further, this poetry identifies the cemetery as its own gallery and us, the art within. We are all art, true art, in our rotting and failing; our decomposition is it’s own making.
There is one exit and we are all going through it. Hard and fast, painful and slow, headfirst and bloody, sad and silent.
I really appreciated this collection’s unabashed and unapologetic honesty. This poetry is ugly and gruesome, shining light on our most unflattering angles removing the pretense and artifice to reveal the flesh and bone beneath, smiling “without amusement”.
Highly recommend this collection! It’s brutal in the best ways~
Another beautifully odd and delightfully irreverent collection of poetry that looks out on life’s galleries, her masterpieces and contemplative still-lifes, her mastery of chiaroscuro and abstraction, and frantically searches for escape routes.
This collection challenges the gilded frames of art and the museum’s marble floors, confronts our notions of what “appreciation” for art entails and who is entitled to that appreciation. Further, this poetry identifies the cemetery as its own gallery and us, the art within. We are all art, true art, in our rotting and failing; our decomposition is it’s own making.
There is one exit and we are all going through it. Hard and fast, painful and slow, headfirst and bloody, sad and silent.
I really appreciated this collection’s unabashed and unapologetic honesty. This poetry is ugly and gruesome, shining light on our most unflattering angles removing the pretense and artifice to reveal the flesh and bone beneath, smiling “without amusement”.
Highly recommend this collection! It’s brutal in the best ways~
January 18, 2024
I wish I could make a New Year's resolution like "to read a poetry book as good as this one by Diane Seuss every month" but I know I'd be setting myself up for failure. For what are the chances of reading verses this good every month, contemporary verses, back alley stories, ugly confessions, warped reflections, effectively collected twelve times in a row? I'd have to read way too many books that fell short, hear too many others unable to make Alice Neel and Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollack come alive, experience too many erudite takes on classic painting when there's a grittier truth staring from the canvas unimpressed by the latest Wikipediaed resurrection? Speaking of the dead, "Still Life..." overflows with spirits, and not just the souls of Dad, Mikel, and Kev, but also Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, and Medusa, and also a turkey carcass, a shot rabbit, and a frozen fish, not to mention all the Dianes she summons up from her past. For what are we but today's version of who we were yesterday looking further back at older versions and wondering who we might become. Does it help to look at art? I would guess yes. Does it help to read Diane Seuss? Of this, I'm positively sure.
May 8, 2022
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
She comes out of the dark seeking pie, but instead finds two dead peacocks.
One is strung up by its feet. The other lies on its side in a pool
of its own blood. The girl is burdened with curly bangs. A too-small cap.
She wanted pie, not these beautiful birds. Not a small, dusky apple
from a basket of dusky apples. Reach in. Choose a dusky apple.
She sleepwalked to this window, her body led by its hunger for pie.
Instead, this dead beauty, gratuitous. Scalloped green feathers. Gold breast.
Iridescent-eyed plumage, supine on the table. Two gaudy crowns.
She rests her elbows on the stone windowsill. Why not pluck a feather?
Why lean against the gold house of the rich and stare at the bird’s dead eye?
The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it.
Build a fire on the riverbank. Tear away the beautiful feathers.
Suck scorched, tough, dark meat off of hollow bones. Look at her, ready to reach.
She’d hoped for pie. Meringue beaded gold. Art, useless as tits on a boar.
She comes out of the dark seeking pie, but instead finds two dead peacocks.
One is strung up by its feet. The other lies on its side in a pool
of its own blood. The girl is burdened with curly bangs. A too-small cap.
She wanted pie, not these beautiful birds. Not a small, dusky apple
from a basket of dusky apples. Reach in. Choose a dusky apple.
She sleepwalked to this window, her body led by its hunger for pie.
Instead, this dead beauty, gratuitous. Scalloped green feathers. Gold breast.
Iridescent-eyed plumage, supine on the table. Two gaudy crowns.
She rests her elbows on the stone windowsill. Why not pluck a feather?
Why lean against the gold house of the rich and stare at the bird’s dead eye?
The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it.
Build a fire on the riverbank. Tear away the beautiful feathers.
Suck scorched, tough, dark meat off of hollow bones. Look at her, ready to reach.
She’d hoped for pie. Meringue beaded gold. Art, useless as tits on a boar.
November 21, 2019
I looked for this book initially because I read Diane Seuss's poem "Bowl" someplace (not sure where), and just fell into the story it told so beautifully. Some of the poems in this collection will punch you in the gut (and perhaps the heart). "Stateline Pastoral" was both really funny and really sad, and really familiar if you grew up in the Midwest. "We're leery of books, they way they colonize the imagination," she writes in this poem, and I completely understand. I've met so many of the people Seuss writes about before.
I feel like such a dummy writing about poetry. I know what I like, or what speaks to me, and Diane Seuss's book of poems did both. Like so many poems, Seuss can be enigmatic, and I don't always understand what each poem means. Not everyone poem speaks to me either. But take as a whole, I loved this book.
I feel like such a dummy writing about poetry. I know what I like, or what speaks to me, and Diane Seuss's book of poems did both. Like so many poems, Seuss can be enigmatic, and I don't always understand what each poem means. Not everyone poem speaks to me either. But take as a whole, I loved this book.
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