Diane Seuss

Seuss's third collection, Four Legged Girl, is "concerned with loss," including the deaths of her father and of a former lover, but also addresses "importance of living in the present," writes Marybeth Rua-Larsen.[7] She goes on "In Four-Legged Girl, Seuss not only turns the common associations of flowers as gentle and delicate things easily damaged into symbols of strength and aggression but does so with energy, inventiveness, and a wildness that is incapable of being tamed."

In the American Poetry Review, Margaree Little addresses the collection's title, which refers to Myrtle Corbin, a Victorian-era person who was born with four legs, and who appears on the cover of the book.[8] Seuss begins and ends the book with works taking inspiration from Corbin.[7] Little writes that Seuss's poems are "borne of traumas" and sees Corbin as a mirror of Seuss's self-identification "as a spectacle, an exhibit, a performance."[8]

Writing for The Rumpus, Ellen Mack-Miller notes a sense of animism in Four-Legged Girl, writing "Seuss animates. Objects come alive, like toys springing from a chest when darkness comes."[9] Four Legged Girl was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize; the nomination called the collection "a gallery of incisive and beguiling portraits and landscapes."[10]

Seuss's collection 'Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks' takes its title from the Rembrandt painting of the same name, and each section of the collection begins with an image derived from the painting.[5] Other poems references paintings Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O'Keefe, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock among others.[11] Reviewer Laurie Stone writes that the poems' use of painting allows them to "freeze time" and makes them a "lab for experiments with language, rough emotions, and the indeterminacy of feeling."[12] Los Angeles Times reviewer Victoria Chang describes the effect of Seuss's use of painting to frame her poems: "By the end of the book, we see how a painting (and the speaker's life) have become so much more because we have taken the painting (and life) apart and expanded each fragment.... art, in particular still life art, is anything but useless."[5]

frank: sonnets comprises 128 poems, all sonnets. Critic Laurie Stone sees Seuss's use of poetic form as a metaphor: "A sonnet is like a trapped body: all physical limits and nowhere to run but inside the lyrical imagination. Fourteen lines, again and again."[13]

Critic Meryl Natchez writes that

... in frank: sonnets, [Seuss] provides fresh imagery, calls out the male icons of the '70s and early '80s New York scene, and directly grapples with loneliness, addiction, abortion, and death. The language is often startling, the incidents pried open for the reader to enter and observe. The overall arc of the book is memoir: stories of grief, of questing, of trying to make sense of a complex life. These poems appear in the order written, with long sequences about Seuss's father, her lovers, her exploits and failures, and the death of a close friend.[14]

The Pulitzer Prize committee described frank: sonnets as "a virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form to confront the messy contradictions of contemporary America, including the beauty and the difficulty of working-class life in the Rust Belt."[15]