Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open: Poems (Juniper Prize for Poetry)
In Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open we are introduced to a poetry both gentle and heart-breaking -- and ferocious. In these fractured, yet lyrical, narratives and voices, there is a remarkable new way of approaching the terrible clarity of beauty and horror in this world. Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer. These poems spring from the depths of a hypnotic sensibility. They exist in the best of the literary and oral traditions -- a love of language revealed in the use of all of its tools. Here is a poet vocalizing so much of what it means to be alive that I felt afraid at times to put the book down or to blink.(Laura Kasischke, author of In a Perfect World and Feathered)For all its considerable invention, wit, tonal complexity, and vivid imagery -- not to mention its economy and concentration -- Diane Seuss's work is never content to settle for craft. There is an insistently human connection to experience in each of her poems.(Stuart Dybek, author of Streets in Their Own Ink)Diane Seuss's poems take us to a place 'beyond the jurisdiction / of the sentence: (to) a secret place, bordered by lilacs.' I could say they were 'compelling' (they are astonishingly so). I could say this poet was 'the best poet of her generation' (she just might be). What I want to say is that sometimes the pure products of America go crazy in a way that changes everything. When was the last time you picked up a book of poems and couldn't for the life of you put it down?(Gail Wronsky, author of Blue Shadow behind Everything Dazzling and Poems for Infidels)