Althea: Poems

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.