Gr. 3-5 New to Wakeview, South Carolina, in the late 1970s, Sylvia, 11, is sad when Momma (really her aunt) leaves for a while to find her family roots. Sylvia stays with her great-grandma Miz Lula Maye, 100 years old, who helps Sylvia with the stress of starting at a new school. When kids tease Sylvia about her friendship with the "old witch," Sylvia is ashamed (and angry at herself for being ashamed), but Miz Lula laughs at the kids and lets Sylvia know that she is always safe and loved at home.
Spanning the time of colonial America through the present day, Poets for Young Adults examines the lives and works of seventy-five poets that are read and loved by teens. Readers will discover an eclectic mix of poets and their styles, from the modern songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Tupac Shakur, to the nineteen sixties icons Jack Kerouac and Sylvia Plath, to such traditional poets as Edgar Allan Poe and William Blake.
It's commonplace to observe that the line between genius and mental illness is razor thin, and critics point to a long list of writers, artists and musicians—from William Blake to Sylvia Plath—as illustrations. Kottler, a professor of counseling at California State University, Fullerton, superficially probes the relationship between madness and creativity through 10 case studies of artists who are as famous for their mental instability as their work: Sylvia Plath, Judy Garland, Mark Rothko, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Charles Mingus, Vaslav Nijinsky, Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce and Brian Wilson.
The first collection of essays to be published since Ted Hughes' death, this volume gathers contributions from most major international Hughes scholars. The collection reflects some well-trodden paths of Hughes criticism, however, it also revisits critical discourse on his work, acknowledging that it is no longer possible to study Hughes without reference to Sylvia Plath. The collection also challenges a critical reception that has prided itself on being the mouthpiece of the poet's own ideological discourse.
