Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl: Poems

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardFinalist for the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeDiane Seuss's brilliant follow-up to Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for PoetryStill life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned DreamsicleStill life with Easter Bunny twenty caged minks and rusty meat grinderStill life with whiskey wooden leg two potpies and a dead parakeetStill life with pork rinds pickled peppers and the Book of RevelationStill life with feeding tube oxygen half-eaten raspberry ZingerStill life with convenience store pecking order shotgun blast to the face-from "American Still Lives"Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt's painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer's own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss's new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt's painting is presented across the book in pieces-details that hide more than they reveal until they're assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish-the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O'Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that "our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting."