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4.09 AVERAGE
4.09 AVERAGE
read for the seeley challenge august 2025!
i just absolutely love sina queyras’ work in general. i identify with their emotions and interior processes a lot of the time, which usually means i find their writing to be very profound. that was also true about my ariel! just as it was about rooms.
i found a good portion of these poems to be pretty good, and the archival work in this collection is impressive and exciting. in general, i don’t like plath, and i find the way she thinks to be frustrating and self involved. that’s a hard hump to get over with this book, as queyras is aiming to rehabilitate plath as a kind of angry mother figure. this is hard for me to overlook and felt tedious at times.
the structure of this book was confusing and scattered but in a way that i sort of loved. so many different styles of poem. in general, just a chaotic grouping of material, which strangely worked for this material and counterbalanced the annoyingness of the plath stuff.
all in all, an impressive work. it really feels like a work more than a collection. can’t believe i found this random signed copy in montreal.
i just absolutely love sina queyras’ work in general. i identify with their emotions and interior processes a lot of the time, which usually means i find their writing to be very profound. that was also true about my ariel! just as it was about rooms.
i found a good portion of these poems to be pretty good, and the archival work in this collection is impressive and exciting. in general, i don’t like plath, and i find the way she thinks to be frustrating and self involved. that’s a hard hump to get over with this book, as queyras is aiming to rehabilitate plath as a kind of angry mother figure. this is hard for me to overlook and felt tedious at times.
the structure of this book was confusing and scattered but in a way that i sort of loved. so many different styles of poem. in general, just a chaotic grouping of material, which strangely worked for this material and counterbalanced the annoyingness of the plath stuff.
all in all, an impressive work. it really feels like a work more than a collection. can’t believe i found this random signed copy in montreal.
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Really interesting autobiographical work where Queyras reworks poems of Plath with varying amounts of loyalty to the original. She draws parallels between her life and Plath’s, engages with her biographers and critics and also writes from other's viewpoints. I'd like to go back to this for a closer reading and comparison with the original poems.
Full review at Little Book Jockey. At first I really liked the parallels to Plath’s own poems and life; however, the more I read, the more I wanted it to end–and it’s only 96 pages. I think Queyras may have taken the motif too far. It was stretched so thin that I got tired of it, even though I’m interested in Plath myself and have written a long essay on her poetry. Even so, Queyras has some great ideas and lines in this collection.
Before I opened this book I reread Ariel. My mind is at a different place now. I know anger and rage and Ariel hooked itself under my ribs, a shell containing a sea of rage and longing and wanting more and nothing all at once. Sina Queyras's My Ariel dwells in the stormy questions regarding Sylvia's life, her art, her afterlives, all the while exploring the corners of her own self as a female poet, a mother, a lover, a fragile mind. This book is a fistful of feeling, of anger, of circling around the self, trying to find that centre of the hive from which all this feeling stems, only to find emptiness, emptiness and more uncertainty and doubt.
challenging
emotional
reflective
Enjoyable but a highly personal poetic work that examines life from a postmodern, whimsical and physical perspective. Its not for everyone's taste but I do think there is some value here.