Still life with two dead peacocks and a girl : poems

Author

Diane Seuss

Call Number

• 811 S4965.2 (CEN, OSH)

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Publication Information

Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, [2018]

Physical Description

108 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Summary

This volume of poetry takes its title from Rembrandt's painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer's troubled gaze. The collection shatters the notion of a still life, and presents the painting in pieces. With invention and irreverence, the poems escape their gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Details from this gallery of lives in shards hide more than they reveal, like fragmented memories, waiting until they are reassembled into a whole.

Contents

• I have lived my whole life in a painting called Paradise
• Girl in a picture frame
• Memory fed me until it didn't
• Still life with self-portrait
• Young hare
• Still life with turkey
• Eden: an outline
• Self-portrait: my legs
• Self-portrait with the ashes of my baby blanket
• Self-portrait with my dead looming behind me
• Self-portrait with double helix
• Self-portrait with levitation
• Still life with two dead peacocks and a girl
• The knight's dream
• Quince, cabbage, melon, and cucumber
• The last still life: the head of Medusa
• Walmart parking lot
• American still lifes (the Gothic sublime in 102 syllables)
• Sentences
• Hindenburg
• There's some I just won't let die
• Bowl
• American run-on sentences
• I look at my face in a red mylar balloon tied to a mailbox
• Stateline pastoral
• The hand has dropped the fruit and it's painted where it falls
• I look up from my book and out at the world through reading glasses
• Silence is so accurate, Rothko wrote
• It seems at times that silence
• Still life with dictator
• The heroic penetrates the quotidian
• Silence again
• Memento mori
• Self-portrait with herbarium
• Self-portrait with Emily Dickinson (Rebirth of mourning)
• Self-portrait with Sylvia Plath's braid
• Self-portrait with Janis's shoe when she sang "Ball and chain" at Monterey Pop, 1967
• Self-portrait with Freddie M (invention of thunder)
• Self-portrait with Amy (creation myth)
• Self-portrait as mouthpiece of an anonymous benefactor
• Two floor mosaics
• Passover lamb
• What could be more beautiful than Fede Galizia's cherries?
• Woman looking at a table
• I climbed out of the painting called Paradise.