frank

sonnets

Diane Seuss

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781804271582
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

'The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without,' Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cels on a filmstrip,  frank: sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of 'beauty or relief.' Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and – in a word – frank.

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• [I drove all the way to Cape Disappointment]
• [The problem with sweetness is death]
• [Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me]
• [I met a man a dying man]
• [It is abominable, unquenchable by touch]
• [Sometimes I can’t feel it]
• [I could do it. I could walk into the sea]
• [Press a foot into this beach]
• [The best is when you respond]
• [From this bench I like to call my bench]
• [Poetry, the only father, landscape]
• [Here on this edge]
• [To return from Paradise]
• [What is it you feel, I asked Kurt]
• [Listening to “Summertime”]
• [There is a certain state of grace]
• [“No need to sparkle”]
• [My earliest memory]
• [Since age three, I went looking]
• [Who wants to be soft? I don’t]
• [I was raised in a rectangle]
• [I was not a large child]
• [Freak accidents do happen]
• [My first crush was Wild Bill Hickok]
• [They lived next door, four boys]
• [I suck so many cough drops]
• [I floated I flew I fell to Earth]
• [That bar, World of the Satisfyin’ Place]
• [Labels now slip off me like clothes]
• [All at once David went catatonic]
• [I want drugs again; whimsy]
• [His body was barely cold]
• [The lambs this year are dumb]
• [One’s got an eye thing]
• [When the lamb humped her leg]
• [After the pigs and lambs and rabbits]
• [The parents tried to build a little Eden]
• [The fat suffering of the farrowing sow]
• [The patriarch of Jesus Camp is dead]
• [It was a land without charm]
• [The White Rabbit was before]
• [They wander in, two Southdowns]
• [He came to us all the way down here with us]
• [For a couple years, I slept nights]
• [Once, I took a Greyhound north]
• [I have slept in many places]
• [My first night in New York]
• [I’m watching A Face in the Crowd]
• [I can’t rest, can’t get no relief]
• [I should have been in cinema]
• [Parties among strangers]
• [There’s something to be said for having]
• [Margaret Sanger did the first one]
• [I saw Robert Creeley]
• [The famous poets came for us]
• [Yes, I saw them all, saw them, met some]
• [I can’t say I loved punk]
• [Thirty-nine years ago is nothing]
• [We all have our trauma nadir]
• [I aborted two daughters]
• [I fell on an incline, talus, tibia]
• [There is a force that breaks the body]
• [It’s that time of spring]
• [OD’d on his suboxone]
• [I hoisted them, two drug dealers]
• [Freelance artist. That’s what you say]
• [How do you stand being so virtuous]
• [Where is the drug to drug]
• [Then, I account it high time to get to sea]
• [Which, he asks me, is your favorite story]
• [She’s a big James Stewart fan]
• [Why would God be so mean, he asks]
• [Then when I grew up]
• [What do you think Elvis’s best song was]
• [On what day do you think Jesus]
• [Maybe we wander]
• [I’ve lived with death from the beginning]
• [I fell in love with death]
• [I could do the love]
• [I’ve encountered the exoskeleton]
• [All lives have their tropes]
• [In the dream, my mother called my name]
• [I dreamed of it again, my dad’s body]
• [I dreamed I had to find my way]
• [Goldenrod, I could say, you know]
• [How will I leave this life, like I left my job]
• [I dreamed a color, no plot, a color]
• [He called from San Francisco]
• [I want to zero in on what he looked like]
• [He said it bummed him out his dick]
• [I saw a little movie of a person stroking]
• [Things feel partial. My love for things is partial]
• [Death does not exist in poetry]
• [I was tethered to this Earth]
• [Abrupt lines on the nature of beauty]
• [Literature is dangerous business]
• [I wanted to be the boy in the book]
• [My literary tastes of late are manic]
• [Chekhov sits waiting for me]
• [Either all of this is an apparition or I am]
• [Mountains black today, hiding]
• [For twenty-six days I lived]
• [When I am away I miss]
• [It’s a real Garden of Eden story]
• [And then landscape was all there was]
• [The emergent self is not a self that loves]
• [Takes time to get to minimalism]
• [All things now remind me]
• [Those days, if I consider them]
• [The world today is wet]
• [The small stuff, the care]
• [I can’t see her clearly]
• [It won’t kill me to be sad again]
• [I wish I still smoked]
• [The sonnet, like poverty]
• [My favorite scent is my own funk]
• [You know what living means]
• [Marry dull]
• [Lately I’ve been feeling about poetry]
• [Ever since Elise brought up]
• [My private parts are many]
• [Back then its hair was Cleopatraed]
• [To say that I’m a witch]
• [After forty years]
• [For me it’s going to be]
• [I courted her, that musky tart]
• [My tits are bruised]
• [I hope when it happens]
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright