Although she wises up much earlier than I did (in childhood, at the time of her father’s passing), this same fatalistic narcissism drives poet Diane Seuss’s latest collection,
frank: sonnets. She begins contemplating suicide, looking out over a cliff. This is an unsettling place to begin a collection of poems sonnets, no less but no matter how irreverently told, this
is a love story, one in which Seuss traces the most peculiar of companionate relationships: her own life, ruthlessly courted by death.
And what is this life? Who is Diane Seuss? Professionally, she is the author of four prior collections of poetry: