Four-Legged Girl
Poems
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer." —Laura Kasischke
For, having imagined your body one way I found it to be another way, it was yielding,
but only as the Destroying Angel mushroom yields, its softness allied
with its poison, and your legs were not petals or tendrils as I'd believed,
but brazen, the deviant tentacles beneath the underskirt of a secret queen
—from "Oh four-legged girl, it's either you or the ossuary"
In Diane Seuss's Four-Legged Girl, her audacious, hothouse language swerves into pain and rapture, as she recounts a life lived at the edges of containment. Ghostly, sexy, and plaintive, these poems skip to the tune of a jump rope, fill a wishing well with desire and other trinkets, and they remember past lush lives in New York City, in rural Michigan, and in love. In the final poem, she sings of the four-legged girl, the body made strange to itself and to others. This collection establishes Seuss's poetic voice, as rich and emotional as any in contemporary poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this visceral whirlwind of a third collection, Seuss (Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open) conjures a distinctly disturbed narrative persona who recalls her life tragedies in unparalleled descriptive language. These griefs are physically located: her father's death in rural Michigan, where "clouds are bags heavy with empties/ gathered from parking lots of strip malls," and a former lover's overdose in New York City. The New York poems reference William Burroughs and Andy Warhol and capture the downtown punk aesthetic: "our clothes, black,/ our hair, our beans, our three rooms on E. 7th nearly windowless." The lover's death recurs as both an inevitability and a shocking blow, as these things often are his ghost "heating a spoon/ of delirium over the smoldering punk of my ruined ardor." In a long poem at the book's center, these two deaths poignantly merge, with the air "lush with ghosts,/ standing in line, hats in hands," and the associations of a familiar song she "can no longer stomach." But welcome moments of humor and joy punctuate the series of downers, such as the celebration of a youthful friendship's "smutty angst and reckless kleptomania at the eye-shadow emporium." Endlessly inventive with her language and feats of imagination, Seuss makes a world full of the trappings of death feel vibrantly alive.
