Starred review from December 4, 2017
Lambda Literary Award–winner Queyras (MxT) reworks Sylvia Plath’s notorious book Ariel in this ambitious and wildly inventive collection. It’s both an anatomy and a structural critique of how women write within and against the patriarchy. Ariel, unpublished at the time of Plath’s suicide in 1963, has long been subject to claim by others: her husband, her daughter, countless literary critics. Queyras enters the fray, blowing what she sees as the whole parasitical enterprise sky high. Readers of Plath will recognize titles and fragments of the original poems, simultaneously radiant and furiously agitated. On every page, the two lives intersect. “It’s a line my father might have/ Said, or Ted,” Queyras writes in the long poem “Years”; a few pages later: “I’m sorry I can’t keep the two strands apart.” Self-deprecating humor tempers her rage. Queyras, roughly the same age as Plath’s children, is embroiled in similarly fraught familial relationships; in midlife, she’s parenting the twins that her partner gave birth to, surprised by her moribund domesticity. “The trouble is I don’t signify mother,” she writes. Spare lyrics, Steinian prose poems, and longer narrative sequences merge to reflect her agility with a stunning range of forms. This visceral, trenchant, and musical book reveals Queyras to be at the height of her powers: “I am no lady. I am scorching air./ You can eat my genius, rare.”