I have loved Sylvia Plath since I read Ariel and The Bell Jar in high school. This book of poems illustrates Sylvia's short life from various perspectives - her mother, brother, and husband, as well as various ex-boyfriends, roommates, friends, neighbors, therapists, and more. It gave a totally different image of Sylvia than I had imagined, but I suppose I imagined her in more of a psychoanalytic light and never imagined that others might have viewed her as some kind of beautiful celebrity in her time. I had read some of Sylvia's journal entries and letters (the ones included in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts) but because those came from Sylvia's perspective, I never got the outsider's view of her. It made her death even more tragic, because it seems in her time she shone bright but then would hit these bouts of depression. I had no idea that Ted Hughes controlled so much information about her posthumously which is really unfortunate. 
 The poems echoed Sylvia's style well, and I felt it was a fitting tribute, although I don't know that the poems could have stood alone without the biographical notes on each page.