The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath Book

Our understanding of Sylvia Plath--an influence felt not only through my generation, whose mothers were born around the same time as she, i.e., 1932, but in the one following--has been greatly widened in recent years via *Birthday Letters*, Ted Hughes' best-selling poetic chronicle of his life with Plath; the woefully underrated feature film *Sylvia*, with superb performances both by Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig in the starring roles; the selling of Hughes' papers to Emory University; and the publication of his letters.

Now there's the appearance of this volume, which juxtaposes well-known Plath scholars like Lydia Bundtzen and Kate Moses (whose best work on Plath remains her novel, *Wintering*)) with newer writers like Tracy Brain, whose focus is Plath's political and cultural concerns, and Kathleen Connors, co-editor of *Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual*. Thus we read *The Unraveling Archive* not as another collection of biographical takes on Plath's work, but as a series of new, and surprising, kaleidoscopic revelations.








(originally printed in *The Tennesseean)