I picked up this poetry book by chance in the stacks one day, and I like to think it was placed there for me by fate. Diane Seuss’s poetry explores difficult topics like grief, body image, disability, addiction, bitter nostalgia, and death, often through a sardonic and darkly humorous gutterpunk lens.
 
Some of my favorite poems in this collection include: “It wasn’t a dream, I knew William Burroughs”,  “My pants are disintegrating. Yes,”, and “It wasn’t love, but love’s template”, all of which exhibit Seuss’s outspokenness and penchant for vulgarity. Whether she is describing 1970s New York City through tales of opiates, dead boyfriends, and beat writers, or rolling over to reveal the ugly underbelly of femininity, she commands her poems with a distinctly brash and unapologetic voice. 

Maybe the ugliness and depravity of Seuss’s beautiful poetry can be summed up best in a line from her poem, “I’m full of sadness”, in which she says, “I’m bursting with femaleness/ like a decapitated saint whose throat spews light the color of straw”. 

Review by Angela Hackstadt
Subject Librarian for Political Science, Public Policy, Public Administration, and Law

Spooky season may be over for most, but any time of year is a good time for a Stephen King classic. Pet Sematary, first published in 1983, continues to terrify new readers nearly 40 years later with its gripping and disturbing narrative. The story revolves around the Creed family (Louis, his wife Rachel, daughter Ellie, and three-year-old son Gage) who  recently moved from Chicago to a new home in rural Maine. In typical King fashion, creepy shenanigans quickly ensue. The title’s unconventional spelling aside - in and of itself a terror - King will draw you in from the start and take you on a journey of twists and turns that will at times leave you thinking to yourself, “What in the heck?” However, the novel’s true terror comes not in the form of overt scares or monsters, but in the subject matter it grapples with. The nature of death is the central theme of this tale, exploring the role that it takes in our lives, how this ironic duality of life and death shapes who we are, and in the possibilities of reversing death altogether if only we could bring back our lost loved ones. But reader beware! As new neighbor Jud Crandall says, sometimes dead is better.