Like so many, I feel a real affinity for the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She’s my favorite poet as Shirley Jackson is my favorite prose writer and Remedios Varo is my favorite artist.
For my MFA explication I wrote about the Plath poem “Fever 103.” I still love that poem which so well captures that feeling of having a high fever without really talking about fever or being ill.
For my PhD dissertation, each chapter was focused on one female poet and one type of identity. For my Plath chapter I wrote about performing gender.
Later, when I began to write more poetry, I could feel the influence of Plath’s poetry on me.
Most inspirational for me was how candid and direct her poetry sounds. And under the surface, I suppose, was her search for who her father was and how he connected to her. These features really guided me in writing Scrap: Salvaging a Family. But they also helped in creating this collage for Raw Lit, Issue 9. The Making of a Daddy which relies upon the imagery from two poems Plath wrote about her father: “Daddy” and “The Colossus.”
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“Spare, precise, and quietly devastating, this is the kind of memoir that stays in the body long after the reading is done.”
That’s what the editorial review at The Book Review calls my memoir.
The Book Revue – 5 Star Review
Here’s another favorite paragraph:
“Her prose has the economy of a poet who knows exactly which word is doing the work and which ones can be cut. She has a remarkable ability to locate enormous emotion inside small, specific objects and moments, a trait that is genuinely rare and that gives the book its distinctive texture.”