Modern Poetry

Modern Poetry is Diane Seuss's collection following her Pulitzer Prize-winning Frank: Sonnets, first published in 2024 by Graywolf Press. Rather than a single narrative, the book is an extended meditation on poetry as an art form and an inheritance — Seuss returns repeatedly to her own education in modern poetry, the postwar and modernist poets she was taught to revere, and what it meant to come to that tradition from a working-class, rural background.

The poems move between personal material — her upbringing in rural Michigan, addiction, grief, and aging — and a running argument with the idea of "modern poetry" as a taught, canonical thing, questioning who gets to define it and who is left out. Formally restless, the collection shifts between received forms and looser structures as it works through what poetry has given her and what it has cost.

It is a book as much about reading and being shaped by poems as it is a collection of poems in its own right.