frank

Reviews / Votes

'The lightning intelligence of Diane Seuss's poems strikes equally the lavish external world and the harrowed interior. A brilliant and devastating account of the making and survival of a poet, frank: sonnets has a relentless, lambent urgency; by its final pages I had to remind myself to breathe.'

-Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain 'Every poem in frank: sonnets is an example of the incomparable Seussian Sonnet.... Acute, resolute, buoyant, and unflinching, frank rings loudest as a synonym for candor, so much do these poems feel tethered to a real life, a real world, simultaneously grounded and spiritual, verbal and existential, with resonances of the blues.'

- Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets 'Seuss transforms "tragic spectacle" into something beautiful, visionary, "revolting and grand".'

- The Nation 'This book is a response to death, a way of living in knowledge of death's privations.... What Seuss is hoping for is an extended enough death to allow for a witty recognition of the shape it is imposing on the life it ends. Beyond that, though, what she wants is enough life to make her death into a kind of "last rhyme", a sound that radiates both into the past and into the future, where it might make contact with your body, or mine.'

- Kamran Javadizadeh, London Review of Books 'Alongside Terrance Hayes, Diane Seuss has a strong case to be considered as the most influential American poet of the last 10 years. A former social worker, over six collections she has become renowned for her fearless excavation of her life in her work.... With her formidable voice, Seuss is one of the most important poets writing now.'

- Rishi Dastidar, Telegraph 'One of the US's most radical and important poets has finally found a home in the UK.... Seuss's writing bristles with irreverent humour and wily energy.'

- Rebecca Tamas, Guardian 'These poems are taut and careful glimpses into a life lived on the fringes but threaded with wildness; there is a constant sense that everything they contain might erupt at any moment.... If autobiographical writing is an attempt to fix a life inside language, frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry are both convincing arguments for the absolute impossibility of ever really succeeding in doing so. Instead, they offer an alternative: debris, glimpses, constellations, ghosts. Suffering and all its attendant bewilderment is given the space it deserves, and pleasure, transcendence, and love are all given due space alongside it.'

- Maija Makela, Stinging Fly 'Seuss layers the work with a litany of cultural and literary references.... It is at that bright, fascinating collision between tradition and innovation that these poems reside.'

- Soft Punk Magazine 'The whole book is ... barbed and artful, dramatizing both Seuss's writing life and her life-life, staking out a territory for the reader to look at and admire but never to control or own.'

- Poetry Foundation 'frank: sonnets feels very close to writing; it is a heady, intoxicating experience. Seuss understands the labor of a sonnet's particular space - the intensity and the balance, the anaphora and the rhyme that can gallop wild inside the sonnet's field.'

- The Rumpus 'This is a writer whose pleasure in building language knocks you over and makes you feel some responsive pleasure'

- Women's Review of Books 'Seuss is at her most moving and morally attuned...'

- Harvard Review 'In frank: sonnets Diane Seuss has written an ambitious, searing, and capacious life story.... Another collection that staggers, one that makes mastery seem effortless, one that's honest, true, gorgeously frank.'

- Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal 'Good lord. I've rarely read a book that feels so intimate, so spoken. I've rarely read a book that makes me feel so spoken to. So with. These are poems born of a kind of wrought faith that, despite all the breaking, language still might bring us closer to each other, and closer to ourselves. Diane Seuss's frank: sonnets shares that faith with us. And goddamn, I am so grateful for that.'

- Ross Gay, author of Inciting Joy