West, fire, archive: poems

Title appears on the title page with each word separated by a space-colon-space. Commas added for clarity.West : Fire : Archive is a poetry collection that challenges preconceived, androcentric ideas about biography, autobiography, and history fueled by the western myth of progress presented in Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier thesis." The first section focuses on mending the erasure of the life of Charmian Kittredge London, the wife of the famous author Jack London, a woman who broke gender norms, traveled the world, and wrote about it. The second section examines the act of autobiography (or what defines the author). In it, Dunkle writes through the complex grief of losing her mother and her community when it is devastated by wildfires and reflects on how these disasters echo the one that brought her family to California, the Dust Bowl. The third section questions the authenticity of the definition of recorded history as it relates to the American West.--Provided by publisher.Box 1: Biography -- Box 2: Autobiography -- Box 3: Recorded History

'A certain minor light':Plath in Brontë country

The poet and academic Sarah Corbett reveals Plath’s profound response to Yorkshire’s powerful and often threatening natural and human landscape, as well as to the writings of Emily Brontë and Ted Hughes. In a handful of poems, Plath can be heard sounding out a Hughesian strain of voice against the ghosts and rumoured angels of her own emergent poetic imagination. These West Yorkshire interludes show Plath making use of an ambivalent energy in the landscape to mirror her self/psyche, a technique that can be seen in many of the Ariel poems, and the beginnings of a working out of the struggle between masculine and feminine voices that was to underpin much of her mature work

Plath's Whimsy

Will May returns us to Plath’s early reception, and finds there a vital but overlooked context for her work: the whimsical. Taking seriously Plath’s fascination with the unthreatening fantasy worlds of children’s stories and their attendant winsome philosophy, May rehabilitates a literary term that has often been used disparagingly by the Movement poets. Instead, he shows us how indebted Plath’s dark comedy and verbal games are to whimsy. With close attention to her children’s stories, May unveils Plath’s cultural conversation with the domestic, the miniature and the absurd, though she herself was disingenuous about her interventions with whimsy. May debunks any notion that Plath’s poetry and stories belong in separate spheres. Neither, he argues, does her children’s writing