frank: sonnets
Diane Seuss
Milkweed Editions, 2021
Review by Clara Otto
Diane Seuss’s 2021 collection frank: sonnets explores addiction, disability, death, and love. In the hands of a less skilled poet the combination of these themes might make for a maudlin or melancholy read, but Seuss’s work never veers into that territory. The Seussian sonnet is fourteen lines, rhythmic, and often includes a volta; while the emotion in these sonnets feels raw, the language is precise.
Reading this collection is a surreal experience—the poems bleed into each other. From the first page the voice of Seuss’s speaker is intimate—almost conspiratorial. This in combination with how the poems are laid out on the page—untitled blocks of text—creates a dizzying experience. However, the sense of the uncanny doesn’t stop there; within the span of two or three lines Seuss will go from describing something seemingly ordinary to subverting it. For example, one moment Seuss’s speaker is standing on the beach—the next, blood is oozing up through the sand instead of saltwater.
frank: sonnets is haunted by a far-reaching cast of characters. The haunting begins before one even opens the book; the cover photo is of Mikel Lindzy, a friend of Seuss’s who died during the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s. The photo was taken by his lover, Alan Martinez. In the notes, Seuss offers two stories behind this photo. The first: Martinez remembers the photo being taken on a trip down to Tijuana “to get some stuff that was rumoured to be an HIV drug.” The second: another friend remembers the photo being taken on a trip to Martinez’s hometown to see the Santa Maria Elks Rodeo and Parade. This discrepancy in memory mirrors a theme that runs throughout Seuss’s work as a whole: how memory erodes, leaving us with memories of people that feel more like ghosts. Nearing the end of the collection, Seuss writes: “Either all of this is an apparition or I am, and where the apparition / began I don’t rightly know, maybe I’m still coupled, maybe I have / a towhead in tow, my singularity in every circumstance a mirage.”
In [I could do it. I could walk into the sea.] Seuss invokes the memory of five famous people who died by drowning—some accidental, some mysterious, some intentional—while contemplating taking her life in the same manner:
Others have before me. Jeff Buckley (1997) he
was only 30. Carol Wayne (1985) the Matinee Lady
and a photo spread in Playboy. Dennis Wilson (1983)
after diving for a photo of his ex-wife he’d tossed
overboard years earlier. Hart Crane, well of course
Hart Crane (1932). Socialite Starr Faithful (1931),
she was only 25, drowned in shallow water near
the store, her lungs feel of sand.
She ends this sonnet with a sing-songy volta, “It’s dark, I love the dark and it loves me. / It would be fun! I could walk into the sea!” unsettling the serious tone she had set up in the poem.
The presence one feels most throughout this collection is that of Seuss’s son, Dylan. Many of the poems are about him, a poem he wrote is included, and a series of seven poems are dialogues with Dylan. In the notes, Seuss writes, “many of the lines are [Dylan’s], verbatim, and are used with his permission.” Seuss writes about her son’s addiction; in the centre of the book, the pages unfold to reveal two sonnets whose lines sprawl all the way to the end of the page. The first chronicles Seuss’s speaker kicking two drug dealers out of her son’s basement apartment. She writes, “they’d come to feast off of what was left / of him, his entrails I guess, he’d moved into that apartment with such high hopes even though it was on the bottom floor.” Seuss’s speaker moves from describing the trappings of addiction (a girlfriend, “a pit bull they named Svetlana”) to describing the birth of her son—“a hard labour in a small-town hospital.” While charting the grief of loving someone in active addiction, Seuss’s speaker does not demean or judge. She ends with a warning: “[S]o don’t ask for my touch is what I’m saying, don’t ask me now to walk among the people.”
The sonnets in this collection are like slipping through a trapdoor—one moment you are standing on solid ground and the next you’re spiralling through dreams, sitting shotgun in a rental car, or on an island without cars that smells of horses. Already a master at her craft, one can only imagine what Seuss’s next collection will hold.
Clara Otto is a queer Canadian writer living on the ancestral and unceded lands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples. Currently, she is an MFA student at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been published in Plenitude Magazine, Ruminate, The Puritan, and elsewhere.