So I’m going to talk a bit about drugs and death and pain, because these topics come up in Diane Seuss’s remarkable frank: sonnets and because these topics touch me personally and inform my reading of Seuss’s poems.

My brother was an addict and we lost him a year ago. It was another death of despair, another death of social negligence and government apathy. According to the CDC, America’s opioid epidemic began in 1999, when deaths from prescription opioids began to rise; or it began in 2010, when deaths by heroin overdose began to spike; or 2013, when fentanyl-induced deaths spiked; or 2017, when the opioid crisis was officially declared a Public Health Emergency. Between 1999 and the day my brother died, at least 700,000 Americans had lost their lives from opioid overdoses. That’s the same number of Americans who died of HIV-related illnesses. That’s roughly twelve times the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War. As with AIDS and Vietnam, the American government waited years and years to intervene in the opioid epidemic in any meaningful way.

A lot of the poems in frank: sonnets are about addiction, poverty, personal pain, and unnecessary death. These are, for many reasons, difficult topics for me (and most other people). Consequently, a lot of the poems in frank: sonnets I skimmed over or skipped altogether, or went back to reread when I was emotionally prepared for them.

But holy shit, these poems are good.

Diane Seuss knows about addiction (her son is a survivor, from what I’ve read), knows about having addiction in your family. She knows about losing friends to AIDS. She knows about poverty. And she knows about sonnets. “The sonnet,” she writes, “like poverty, teaches you what you can do/ without.”

Economy is another thing Seuss knows about. Her sonnets, even the sprawling ones, are cut down to the bone. Take note: these are not the kind of sonnets you may have learned about in school. Like many contemporary poets, Seuss is formally innovative and deviates from the sonnet’s traditional and historic constructions. But she understands how the sonnet's fourteen lines necessarily constrict your writing, and she uses the pressure of that constriction beautifully.

Seuss writes about her childhood Catholicism:

“…even the hospital where I was born was borrowed
from the Catholics, nuns thought I was odd and tried to foist me off
On the Buddhists but they reached through the fog and handed me back.”

She writes about the pain of generational poverty and generational trauma:

“…maybe you’re marked as maudlin, or the one
who marks others as maudlin with a big fat pen. Or a couple hundred years ago
your people were owned. Or your people owned people. Your people were burned.
Or your people lit the match. The evils wriggle through the generations
like corpse worms. My great-great-grandfather beat to death a plow horse
in a field of grain. No wonder everything since has reeked of peasantry and pain.”

And she writes about loss, about losing the people you love through untimely death or through separation, through addiction and anger and broken relationships, through all the unfair and painful tremors that knock people apart from one another. Of a dying friend, she writes:

"... Out of the blue you said that once you were dead I'd never
be able to listen to Blue again, Joni Mitchell's Blue, not just the song but the whole album.
It was a minor curse you lay across my shoulders like a fur dyed blue, and so I listen now
in defiance of you. In the listening the pronouns shift. We are listening. There is no death."