The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

“Diane Seuss’s signature voice–audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude–has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft–ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda–and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor. In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating se