frank: sonnets

By Diane Seuss

A resplendent life in sonnets from the author of Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

“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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781644451410

Book preview

Reviews for frank

[muddyboy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A wonderful collection of poems by a woman at the top of her game. All these poems are generally the same length and structure but what is different are the totally varied subjects each poem is about. When reading the book I was always eager to read the next one sinced the topics are so unique and interesting many of which are mined from's from Suess's many varied life experiences.. This is well deserving of the awards that it has recieved.

[archangelsbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An astonishment, really. These poems took me back to a New York City in the mid-80s, a place so different from now, "another world" as Don Delillo said to me at a book signing; a place where you could get anything on the street from Olivetti portable manual typewriters to whatever poison was your destruction of choice; a place where there were weekly memorial services for the multitude dying of AIDS. This book is a song to that era, to a poet's friend who becomes, through these words of love and anger and tenderness and mourning, everyone's friend. Those whom we know and now are gone. I wrote this on a Twitter response: Frank: Sonnets is an act of remembrance sans the pretty film of nostalgia. A song to the lost of a different age and, by the associations of our own lives, the lost of our current age.