Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss
Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss
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Modern Poetry
Poems

Author: Diane Seuss

Narrator: Diane Seuss

Unabridged: 2 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/10/2024


Synopsis

Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor.

In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time's deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? "It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem," Seuss writes. "You can't hide / from what you made / inside what you made." What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.

About Diane Seuss

Diane Seuss is the author of five books of poetry, including frank: sonnets, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Voelcker Prize, and a finalist for the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize. She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Michigan.


Reviews

Poetry has long been a favorite art form of mine. As Dylan Thomas once said, ‘good poem is a contribution to reality’ and in harnessing language to its most malleable possibilities, poetry can unlock reality to better understand it in the abstract. A perfect phrase can send your heart soaring or br......more

Goodreads review by Hallie

The way Seuss uses such unique imagery is fascinating to me: “Love, that little wood tick. That tick-in-the ass. Say the word enough times inside your head, it will fall out of its meaning like a stillborn, plop, into the toilet.” This quote describes me perfectly: “To return to the world, I must lear......more

Goodreads review by Bella

Diane Seuss is back and better than ever. Her trademark vulnerability and deceptive simplicity are stronger than ever in this new collection that, among other things, reckons with poetry's past and its potential future. I will admit that I have grown skeptical of critiques of the "canon" which I ofte......more

Goodreads review by Jillian

These poems had an almost musical cadence to them, showcasing the author’s mastery of her craft. This isn’t an all-time favourite for me, but I had a lovely afternoon reading it.......more

Goodreads review by Peter

“So what did modern poetry mean? Maybe just fucked up.” I loved frank: sonnets for capturing a life lived in its complexity, framing difficult images and topics in a way that surprised and challenged me for the whole ride. Modern Poetry is like its photo negative - but as Seuss states she doesn’t bel......more