All poetry lovers with a taste for the exquisite.

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018) by Diane Seuss

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. [...]

Write poetry as Diane Seuss writes poetry.

Totally absorbed by wonderful words and meaning.

Diane Seuss (1956)

It's worth the Nobel Prize for Literature

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

On the back cover:

"Death, class, gender, and art are among the entwined preoccupations in this marvelous, complex, attractive, frightening book, which allows life to spill out of the frames of the artworks providing occasions for the poems. Ekphrasis (art about art) in Seuss's wonderfully flexible syntax, with her linguistic pizazz and startling juxtapositions, removes boundaries between living and dying. paradise and hell, made things and lived things. " - Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book 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, privileges, and beauty, and creates an alternative landscape through self-portraits and gothic still lifes...The poems, ranging from darkly challenging to direct and moving, require readers to levitate above their own assumptions and embrace a world that is, in many ways, 'a paradise of vagaries'" - Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post.

110 pages of pure gold!- Me

Forty-Five Poems, another masterpiece of the author of Four-legged Girl (2015), finalist of the Pulitzer Prize.

I was in awe by her first collection of poetry, I am more so with this one. She matured and found her genius style in poetry. There is no one like her.

Art, Poetry, Life, and Death, what more is there? She deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature, as far as I'm concerned!

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Created Sep 18, 2024 at 2:03am • Submit your own review...