Four-Legged Girl: Poems

Review In her electric new book, Diane Seuss speaks as a backwards Oracle, bringing the laser eye of aftermath to the 'archived selves': the one who 'looked up into the dark for something to bloom by,' the one tenderized and traumatized by New York City in its days of junkie glory: boyfriend stealing her blind for a fix, encounters with William Burroughs and Andy Warhol, 'a column of chalk at dead center of the gallery.' These poems feel driven by a fury for correction: romantic ideal is delusion, the charisma of the poete maudit a huckster's sham. Seuss blazes up into the dark and dirty corners of youthful folly, in poems that are visually sharp and linguistically alive; her voice is lucid, earthy, mordant, and funny. No pity, no quarter, for the old self: 'Some of us claw our way to the bottom,' Seuss writes, 'transcend downward. There at the hub / of the drain we swirl.' (