Althea - by Diane Seuss (Hardcover)

About the Book

An extraordinary and rapturous new collection by Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for frank: sonnets

Book Synopsis

An extraordinary and rapturous new collection by Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for frank: sonnets

Althea is an evocative swerve in Diane Seuss's ongoing exploration of the language used to describe the particular off-brand of warped freedom radiated by the rural poor. These poems are ravishing lyric distillations of a place broken by policy, loss, and isolation, where most things don't last, including its people, but poetry has held on. In playful interactions with poems of the past and with Gwendolyn Brooks as a presiding authority, Seuss creates compressed lines and insistent rhymes to depict a world constrained by social rules deserving of parody and protest.

Enter Althea: a tenacious adolescent, a flower, a song, an adamant bookworm, an apparition of aborted daughters, an elusive figure glimpsed at the edges of landscape, or perhaps herself the landscape. Like poetry, she exists outside the margins of the definable. Her origins are wild asters and the stars--and roadkill overrun by the inequities of class, gender, and poverty.

Seuss's taut, sonically propulsive poems capture the sound of grief for the world unscreened, the past, the dead, and the intensifying ravagings of this country against its people and the imagination.

Review Quotes

"Every Diane Seuss book prospects and delivers her exceptional and wild carnival of kaleidoscopic mind.She flips us over every time. Althea is our newest gift on this frolicking ride of lyrical revelry. Diane Seuss is a walking thunderbolt of wonder words."--Nikky Finney

About the Author

Diane Seuss is the author of seven acclaimed poetry collections, including Modern Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Award, and frank: sonnets, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Michigan.