Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)

In the blue hour before her children woke, through the coldest London winter in decades, Sylvia Plath wrote these poems one and two a day, and you can hear the speed in them, each line flung rather than set. _Ariel_ is the book where grief stops confessing and starts performing. The woman in "Lady Lazarus" does not survive her breakdowns so much as stage them, rising out of the ash with red hair to eat men like air. The father in "Daddy" is not mourned but executed, a stake through the fat black heart, in a nursery sing-song that should not be able to hold such violence and does. Between the famous detonations sit the quieter terrors: a hospital room invaded by tulips too red and too excitable, a box of bees pressed to the ear, a baby's cry set going like a fat gold watch. She finished them weeks before her death and never saw them bound. The title poem ends mid-gallop, the rider dissolving into the red eye of morning, refusing to the last to slow down.