What do you think?
Rate this book
Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open: Poems
Diane Seuss's poems grow out of the fertile soil of southwest Michigan, bursting any and all stereotypes of the Midwest and turning loose characters worthy of Faulkner in their obsession, their suffering, their dramas of love and sex and death. The first section of this collection pays homage to the poet's roots in a place where the world hands you nothing and promises less, so you are left to invent yourself or disappear. From there these poems both recount and embody repeated acts of defiant self-creation in the face of despair, loss, and shame, and always in the shadow of annihilation.
With darkly raucous humor and wrenching pathos, Seuss burrows furiously into liminal places of no dimension—state lines, lakes' edges, the space "between the m and the e in the word amen." From what she calls "this place inbetween" come profane prayers in which "the sound of hope and the sound of suffering" are revealed to be "the same music played on the same instrument."
Midway through this book, a man tells the speaker that beauty is that which has not been touched. This collection is a righteous and fierce counterargument: in the world of this imagination, beauty spills from that which has been crushed, torn, and harrowed. "We receive beauty," Seuss writes, "as a nail receives / the hammer blow." This is the poetry that comes only after the white dress has been blown open—the poetry of necessity, where a wild imagination is the only hope.
With darkly raucous humor and wrenching pathos, Seuss burrows furiously into liminal places of no dimension—state lines, lakes' edges, the space "between the m and the e in the word amen." From what she calls "this place inbetween" come profane prayers in which "the sound of hope and the sound of suffering" are revealed to be "the same music played on the same instrument."
Midway through this book, a man tells the speaker that beauty is that which has not been touched. This collection is a righteous and fierce counterargument: in the world of this imagination, beauty spills from that which has been crushed, torn, and harrowed. "We receive beauty," Seuss writes, "as a nail receives / the hammer blow." This is the poetry that comes only after the white dress has been blown open—the poetry of necessity, where a wild imagination is the only hope.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 2010
3 people are currently reading
289 people want to read
About the author
Diane Seuss
25 books231 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
June 15, 2016
Oh my god, thank you whoever sent this. I experienced it as an expression of some sort of love, and figure this is ok since whoever you are at least at some point I’ve given you my address.
Timing: perfect. Got home from a long day, in a heartbroken week, and the book in its envelope was sitting on the front porch chair. I sat down and started reading from the back, last poem first and so on to the front. Didn’t get up until it had gotten to be evening. How many poetry books can hold your mind like that?
I’d never heard of this writer, but can say on the first pass that she is world class. That the images are raw, inappropriate, and all about Michigan summer completes the perfection of the timing on this one. I leave Michigan summer for India next week. It’s rare that I miss people or places, but I miss this already.
Here’s part of the poem called Even in Hell There Are Songbirds
...in hell birds are free
but they are not symbolic of freedom, there are no
symbols in hell, the moonflowers open and close
their mouths but have nothing to say, the bees sting
the poppy’s heart and carry away its black pollen,
and we in our uniforms sit in our lawn chairs and watch,
we take it all in, we let it pound us like breakers
into the side of a tethered wooden boat, we receive
beauty as a nail receives the hammer blow…
we cannot rub even two words together,
not enough to let loose
a spark, not enough to light a fire in a thimble,
and this is the hell of it.
Timing: perfect. Got home from a long day, in a heartbroken week, and the book in its envelope was sitting on the front porch chair. I sat down and started reading from the back, last poem first and so on to the front. Didn’t get up until it had gotten to be evening. How many poetry books can hold your mind like that?
I’d never heard of this writer, but can say on the first pass that she is world class. That the images are raw, inappropriate, and all about Michigan summer completes the perfection of the timing on this one. I leave Michigan summer for India next week. It’s rare that I miss people or places, but I miss this already.
Here’s part of the poem called Even in Hell There Are Songbirds
...in hell birds are free
but they are not symbolic of freedom, there are no
symbols in hell, the moonflowers open and close
their mouths but have nothing to say, the bees sting
the poppy’s heart and carry away its black pollen,
and we in our uniforms sit in our lawn chairs and watch,
we take it all in, we let it pound us like breakers
into the side of a tethered wooden boat, we receive
beauty as a nail receives the hammer blow…
we cannot rub even two words together,
not enough to let loose
a spark, not enough to light a fire in a thimble,
and this is the hell of it.
Read
April 7, 2011So I was in that snotty independent bookstore that I hate, but the good part was that I discovered this book, opened up and read “in hell birds are free/but they are not symbolic of freedom” -- and so I needed to take it home. I don’t love all the poems, but if I did then what would that mean exactly? Would that be a good sign? So many startling, gorgeous lines -- “the year/they decided we would need religion and a dog” -- “Packed my reptile/suitcase, left my skin behind” -- “flowers are male, darling, hold them.”
September 30, 2015
As I went to review this book, I realized that I cannot say it as well as Amy, on Goodreads said it. So outside of saying, this imaginative, gut punching, linguistic trapeze of a collection is glorious, I'll leave you with part of her review:
"Seuss does not shy from the graphic, and addresses sadness, longing, sex, death, and fear as though she's on her own deathbed. She can get away with what may feel gratuitous because the voice speaks like it's on this precipice between life and death, and because there are some stunning images and atmosphere to support it. The speaker seems to be affirming that she's no longer playing Mr. Nice Guy; she's had enough sorrow and damage to earn herself the right to just speak, without censor or concern for pleasing others."
"Seuss does not shy from the graphic, and addresses sadness, longing, sex, death, and fear as though she's on her own deathbed. She can get away with what may feel gratuitous because the voice speaks like it's on this precipice between life and death, and because there are some stunning images and atmosphere to support it. The speaker seems to be affirming that she's no longer playing Mr. Nice Guy; she's had enough sorrow and damage to earn herself the right to just speak, without censor or concern for pleasing others."
July 23, 2023
not sure
September 24, 2025
Diane Seuss, you are my patron saint.
Read
September 19, 2011Seuss does not shy from the graphic, and addresses sadness, longing, sex, death, and fear as though she's on her own deathbed. She can get away with what may feel gratuitous because the voice speaks like it's on this precipice between life and death, and because there are some stunning images and atmosphere to support it. The speaker seems to be affirming that she's no longer playing Mr. Nice Guy; she's had enough sorrow and damage to earn herself the right to just speak, without censor or concern for pleasing others.
From Baby goodbye:
Fuck it. You dig until you die. You carve a hole
for your sadness and dance inside it
From Soft pink apple covered in bees:
She held an apple in her hand,
her palm extended like a pleasure boat.
From I'm glorious in my destruction like an atomic bomb:
my cousin picked me up at the Amtrak
station in Kalamazoo coming in
from New York city he'd not seen me
since before breast buds I'd just hennaed
my hair I mean it was an oil refinery
explosion and he said you're more
ravaged than I expected and that was
nearly thirty years ago so
what in the hell am I now
From Fathoms:
A blue bowl. A fading sky. The lake was a nighttime thing,
and so long ago. Unfathomable.
From Baby goodbye:
Fuck it. You dig until you die. You carve a hole
for your sadness and dance inside it
From Soft pink apple covered in bees:
She held an apple in her hand,
her palm extended like a pleasure boat.
From I'm glorious in my destruction like an atomic bomb:
my cousin picked me up at the Amtrak
station in Kalamazoo coming in
from New York city he'd not seen me
since before breast buds I'd just hennaed
my hair I mean it was an oil refinery
explosion and he said you're more
ravaged than I expected and that was
nearly thirty years ago so
what in the hell am I now
From Fathoms:
A blue bowl. A fading sky. The lake was a nighttime thing,
and so long ago. Unfathomable.
May 28, 2016
A near-flawless collection of poems. Lines run out from the previous one and slap you across the face, while other poems quietly chirp along seamlessly leaving the reader breathless. Diane Seuss is doing it as good as anyone writing today.
September 28, 2010
I GUESS SHE IS LIKE A GUILLOTINE BECAUSE SHE TOOK OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD.
GET IT. POETRY.
GET IT. POETRY.
January 13, 2025
“I was trying / to escape myself but all I knew how to do / was to swim deeper into myself / and I wasn’t enough for myself anymore.” I had only ever read (and loved) individual poems by Diane Seuss before, but Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, her second poetry collection, was a perfect way to immerse myself more fully in her work. It excavates the self while rendering a cast of characters and presences in vivid life, all in poems that contend with their own form, the limits of language, and questions of who speaks and when. “I’m writing under the influence / of heartbreak and I’ve already broken // the code of silence on the subject of writing”, she writes in ‘The cooked goose’; elsewhere, “When I was alone, / I’d walk around narrating”; “The river is falling into / the body. Your river. / My body. Pronoun / falls into noun. / The river purrs / and burns.” I really enjoyed ‘This is now’; the moving, plaintive ‘I met a moon-faced man’, which ends “back in the days when i had a body”; ‘Spring’s confessional poem’, which opens with the final words of Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses; the evocative title poem; the brilliantly titled ‘I’m glorious in my destruction like an atom bomb’. These poems often dance between the sublime and the mundane: “I walk among ghosts. / Even at the store”. Here men “haunt the margins / in gray suits”; here “we were not sad, we did not lose each other, we were // happy, we were unclean.” Desire and the self are navigated in poems as lyrical as they are self-aware, wherein “There is no plot, // there are only lovers, or those who avoid love, / or refute it.” Now to find and inhale her four other collections…
November 17, 2018
These poems are wild and unrestrained, full of impossible juxtapositions. Details of day-to-day life and fantastic otherworldly images are jammed into the same stanza and forced to coexist. For instance, these lines from “In search of the molecular structure of benzene”: “I figured out a new way to play solitaire/ but I no longer remember how it’s done./ Somehow the deck of cards consumed itself/ and licked its own fingers by midnight.”
The speaker alternates between grandiosity and self-deprecation, but even her self-deprecation is grandiose. In “I’m glorious in my destruction like an atomic bomb,” she writes “I’m fucking/ fascinating I am a tangled sullied/ wilderness scarified with highways” and later “this is why I can’t be/ your lover you want me/ beautiful and I am only/ beautiful if you thought the bombing/ of Baghdad was beautiful”
I leave you with the very last lines of the collection: “off to the seamstress/ with pins in her mouth, and off to the wedding/ chapel, and off to the maker of shrouds, same/ lady, same quick needle made of silver light.”
The speaker alternates between grandiosity and self-deprecation, but even her self-deprecation is grandiose. In “I’m glorious in my destruction like an atomic bomb,” she writes “I’m fucking/ fascinating I am a tangled sullied/ wilderness scarified with highways” and later “this is why I can’t be/ your lover you want me/ beautiful and I am only/ beautiful if you thought the bombing/ of Baghdad was beautiful”
I leave you with the very last lines of the collection: “off to the seamstress/ with pins in her mouth, and off to the wedding/ chapel, and off to the maker of shrouds, same/ lady, same quick needle made of silver light.”
December 8, 2024
[Print] As always, Diane Seuss's unique voice sounds through this collection with evocation of unexpected and engrossing scenes. There is an undercurrent of unspoken desires now given voice, things that are familiar and resonant without being obvious like the confusion of deciphering what someone much older than you means by their stories or the pleasure in meeting a mysterious stranger. At times, the poems do turn in ways that make me feel lost or include details that I cannot define from context alone. But overall, the poetry is simultaneously soothing and electric. Seuss also brings an awareness of language to her work that I find insightful, humorous,, and encouraging. A few favorites from this collection include "Grammar lesson," "When I was a candy striper I used to braid and unbraid the hair of the ancients," "The cooked goose," "Wolf Lake, white gown blown open," "Fathoms," and "Even in hell there are songbirds."
January 18, 2023
Maybe 3.25 or 3.5? It's hard to rate books when you only have the 5 star step scale, no decimals. i would be rating books on here to the nearest thousandth of a star.
anyway.
I love Diane Seuss. a lot. four-legged girl changed my life. wolf lake..... didn't change my world but it gave me appreciation and context for Diane Seuss as a poet and a human being. Much more pastoral and michigan-teenager-young-love-gone-wrong-losing-virginity-and-trout-fishing. grief and loss still reek through the collection, as in four-legged girl and still life with four dead peacocks (or smth like that? forget the exact title atm). its a different lens on the same subjects. I appreciate what it is and it is a good read, but it stands out less than other works.
i don't really have any specific poems that stuck out to me to list here.
anyway.
I love Diane Seuss. a lot. four-legged girl changed my life. wolf lake..... didn't change my world but it gave me appreciation and context for Diane Seuss as a poet and a human being. Much more pastoral and michigan-teenager-young-love-gone-wrong-losing-virginity-and-trout-fishing. grief and loss still reek through the collection, as in four-legged girl and still life with four dead peacocks (or smth like that? forget the exact title atm). its a different lens on the same subjects. I appreciate what it is and it is a good read, but it stands out less than other works.
i don't really have any specific poems that stuck out to me to list here.
Read
August 20, 2023some favorite excerpts:
it was the idea of the calf i loved
• i invented sadness, reached down into my emptiness like a wising well and drew up a small wooden bucket of tears
in search of the molecular structure of benzene
• i was trying to escape myself but all i knew how to do was to swim deeper into myself and i wasn’t enough for myself anymore. ouroboros. i napped down there, dreamed i opened the carbon ring. packed my reptile suitcase, left my skin behind.
baby goodbye
• fuck it. you dig until you die. you carve a hole for your sadness and dance inside it, like a worm in a jumping bean.
wolf lake, white gown blown open
• there is body, there is experience, there is narrative, there is idea, memory, philosophy, love —
and there are gods
and there are the opera of the gods —
there is desire
and desire’s cold blue-eyed twin
it was the idea of the calf i loved
• i invented sadness, reached down into my emptiness like a wising well and drew up a small wooden bucket of tears
in search of the molecular structure of benzene
• i was trying to escape myself but all i knew how to do was to swim deeper into myself and i wasn’t enough for myself anymore. ouroboros. i napped down there, dreamed i opened the carbon ring. packed my reptile suitcase, left my skin behind.
baby goodbye
• fuck it. you dig until you die. you carve a hole for your sadness and dance inside it, like a worm in a jumping bean.
wolf lake, white gown blown open
• there is body, there is experience, there is narrative, there is idea, memory, philosophy, love —
and there are gods
and there are the opera of the gods —
there is desire
and desire’s cold blue-eyed twin
May 10, 2024
i am less a woman than a ball of mercury breaking
into forty pieces of silver.
-- "I lie back on my red coverlet and contemplate"
there is no story. Is there ever a story?
Things happen, but it is as if we are in a diorama,
the lake a jar lid filled with tap water, toothpick
tree trunks, paper heron painted blue. There is no plot,
there are only lovers, or those who avoid love,
or refute it.
-- "Fathoms"
into forty pieces of silver.
-- "I lie back on my red coverlet and contemplate"
I am a tangled sullied
wilderness scarified with highways
(...)
you want me
beautiful and I am only
beautiful if you thought the bombing
of Baghdad was beautiful
-- "I'm glorious in my destruction like an atomic bomb"
there is no story. Is there ever a story?
Things happen, but it is as if we are in a diorama,
the lake a jar lid filled with tap water, toothpick
tree trunks, paper heron painted blue. There is no plot,
there are only lovers, or those who avoid love,
or refute it.
-- "Fathoms"
May 7, 2024
Song in my heart
If there’s pee on the seat it’s my pee,
battery’s dead I killed it, canary at the bottom
of the cage I bury it, like God tromping the sky
in his undershirt carrying his brass spittoon,
raging and sobbing in his Hush Puppy house
slippers with the backs broke down, no Mrs.
God to make him reasonable as he gets out
the straight razor to slice the hair off his face,
using the Black Sea as a mirror when everyone
knows the Black Sea is a terrible mirror,
like God is a terrible simile for me but like
God with his mirror, I use it.
If there’s pee on the seat it’s my pee,
battery’s dead I killed it, canary at the bottom
of the cage I bury it, like God tromping the sky
in his undershirt carrying his brass spittoon,
raging and sobbing in his Hush Puppy house
slippers with the backs broke down, no Mrs.
God to make him reasonable as he gets out
the straight razor to slice the hair off his face,
using the Black Sea as a mirror when everyone
knows the Black Sea is a terrible mirror,
like God is a terrible simile for me but like
God with his mirror, I use it.
February 20, 2019
Poems on poems full of astonishing, yet essential images. Swings between humor and devastation (often in the same line!) And the music! And the tender, tender heart at the center! And the voice, soft and sharp and so, so smooth. Wonderful book from a wonderful poet.
Read
January 11, 2025she has weddings correctly—like they’re something with fur (merle oppenheim’s object). a way to make the self ceremonial (“We were young. We loved death.”) i would love to look at men like this someday but i’ve only been able to see people i don’t respect clearly
August 23, 2017
This is one of those books that I read in just the right moment. It speaks to me and my current mind. I look forward to reading it again someday to learn what it says to future me.
March 23, 2018
By page 53, I had ordered all of her other books.
That's it. That's all you really need to know. I couldn't even get to the end of what I held in my hands before I was hungry for the rest.
That's it. That's all you really need to know. I couldn't even get to the end of what I held in my hands before I was hungry for the rest.
July 25, 2023
Read it all in one sitting, Diane is a fantastic poet whose words deeply resonate with me. I immediately ordered all her other books after putting this one down.
October 24, 2023
She is wicked good. One gets the impression that she can do anything.
November 23, 2023
Diane Seuss NEVER misses
January 29, 2024
Not my cup of tea but the poems were lovely!
October 6, 2025
Unique modern voice with obvious classical influences.
May 26, 2015
An ex student of Diane, who adores her, gave me this book as a gift and I continue to go back and back to it, finding new things every time. Hard to pick favorites here. The one about working in an insane asylum might take it, tho.
December 18, 2015
Dizzying and audacious and startling. "Grammar Lesson" is particularly stunning, and "The cooked goose" flouts the rule against writing poems about writing poems to great effect.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews