Diane Seuss’s signature voice – audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude – has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry.
Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft – ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda – and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented.