"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
"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 "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 "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 "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 "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
