Diane Seuss is the author of six poetry collections, including frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker 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; and Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 and the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.
Photo credit: Gabrielle Montesanti
Judges’ Citation
Diane Seuss’ Modern Poetry is the culmination of a life spent learning the art, of locating “the beauty of drawing near,” of “seeing through time”—and her wry, compelling tone and effortless technique end in something very like wisdom.
Diane Seuss’ Modern Poetry is the culmination of a life spent learning the art, of locating “the beauty of drawing near,” of “seeing through time”—and her wry, compelling tone and effortless technique end in something very like wisdom. She has become an indispensable poet.
Selected poems
by Diane Seuss
No longer at home in the world
and I imagine
never again at home in the world.
Not in cemeteries or bogs
churning with bullfrogs.
Or outside the old pickle shop.
I once made myself
at home on that street,
and the street after that,
and the boulevard. The avenue.
I don’t need to explain it to you.
It seems wrong
to curl now within the confines
of a poem. You can’t hide
from what you made
inside what you made
or so I’m told.
Copyright © 2024 by Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry, Graywolf Press
Curl
- Poetry Foundation Profile
- Life of a Poet: Diane Seuss Library of Congress
- A Poet’s Reckoning With What Poetry Can Do: Interview with Diane Seuss The New Yorker