Assia

by Sandra Simonds

Overview

Based loosely on the life of Assia Wevill, a German Jew who escaped the Nazis and eventually became the woman whose affair with Ted Hughes broke up his marriage to Sylvia Plath, Assia is the first novel from poet Sandra Simonds. Haunted by Plath's suicide and her own unfulfilled literary ambition, and abandoned by both Hughes and her husband, the real-life Assia struggled to imagine a viable life for herself in the turbulent political landscape of the 1960s. In 1969, she killed herself and her young child, in what is widely viewed as an attempt to copy Plath's famous suicide. Lending a contemporary feminist perspective to an unrecognized chapter in modern literary history, Assia is a novel that asks us to hold our judgment and to consider the personal and political histories of people who commit unthinkable acts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934819920
Publisher:	Noemi Press
Publication date:	03/15/2023
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Sandra Simonds is the award-winning author of eight books books of poetry: Triptychs (Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press, Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems and criticism have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. She is the recipient of the Readers' Choice Award for her sonnet "Red Wand," which was published on Poets, the Academy of American Poets website. She went to UCLA for her BA, University of Montana for her MFA and Florida State for her PhD. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.