Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Diane Seusss brilliant follow-up to Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Still life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned Dreamsicle
Still life with Easter Bunny twenty caged minks and rusty meat grinder
Still life with whiskey wooden leg two potpies and a dead parakeet
Still life with pork rinds pickled peppers and the Book of Revelation
Still life with feeding tube oxygen half-eaten raspberry Zinger
Still 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 Rembrandts painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewers own troubled gaze. In Diane Seusss new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandts painting is presented across the book in piecesdetails that hide more than they reveal until theyre 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 freakishthe overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, OKeeffe, 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.