A woman rises at dawn, peels off her old skin, and flies into a sun that will consume her. Sylvia Plath's Ariel, published in 1965, two years after her death, contains poems written in the white heat of October and November 1962, sometimes two or three a day, in the early hours before her children woke. The voice is fierce, precise, and terrifyingly alive, moving from the domestic to the mythic without transition, transforming a cut thumb into a pilgrimage and a beekeeping ritual into a coronation. Plath remade the lyric poem into something that could hold fury and tenderness in a single breath. These are not cries of despair. They are acts of total artistic command, burning with the clarity of a mind that flinched at nothing.