Diane Seuss is the author of five poetry collections, including frank: sonnets (2021), the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2022 as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Four-Legged Girl (2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010), winner of the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry; and It Blows You Hollow (1998). She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
In a 2018 review of Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, which Seuss worked on at MacDowell in 2015, Victoria Chang writes that Seuss’s poems “aspire to complicate, drawing connections between unrelated things, flowing in and out and back and away from their initial triggers.” It is this matchless skill for synthesizing apparently disparate images and tones that allows Seuss to seek out a space “where the possible anoints the forehead / of the impossible.”
Portrait by Gabrielle Montesanti
