Perhaps by making pain formal, or rendering it as a joke, Diane Seuss also makes it tolerable. If frank: sonnets is haunted by corpses, the poet’s own body is also an abiding concern throughout: ‘There is a force that breaks the body, inevitable,/the by-product is pain, unexceptional as a rain/gauge, which has become arcane, rhyme, likewise.’ Here pain and rhyme are both understood as forms of measurement, records of injury.