Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Diane Seuss’s brilliant follow-up to Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Still life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned Dreamsicle
Still life with Easter Bunny twenty caged minks and rusty meat grinder
Still life with whiskey wooden leg two potpies and a dead parakeet
Still life with pork rinds pickled peppers and the Book of Revelation
Still life with feeding tube oxygen half-eaten raspberry Zinger
Still life with convenience store pecking order shotgun blast to the face
—from “American Still Lives”
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt’s painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer’s own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss’s new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt’s painting is presented across the book in pieces—details that hide more than they reveal until they’re assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish—the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O’Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that “our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting.”
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Seuss (Four-Legged Girl) homes in on the act of engaging with art to brilliantly imagine worlds beyond a painting's frame. The real art work is in the action of regarding, Seuss suggests: "My eyes were hungry for paint, like I used to imagine/ a horse could taste the green in its mouth// before its lips found the grass." Flanked by invigorating ekphrastic poems and self-portraits, the collection's midsection, with scenes of discarded Americana rolling across a Walmart parking lot, has a different feel. But art abounds here too: "With the contents of one box and one can, we bake something/ so sweet and gold you'll want to marry the pan. In this way,/ we are alchemical." These middle poems focus on ordinary people without condescending or seeing them as tragic figures: "We are like bowls. There have always been bowls. They're shaped the way they are for a reason." Though the book has its moments of mourning, it avoids viewing the still life as a stagnant tableau in favor of considering it a fleeting glimpse of something much larger. These poems may linger in the darkness, but Seuss insists on "giving you/ hope like a weird dessert whether you want it or not."
