Assia

A novel from award-winning poet Sandra Simonds.

With the lyric beauty of the poet she is, Sandra Simonds gives us a fresh portrait of Assia Wevill, a woman previously conceived mostly as a consort, a homewrecker, or a femme fatale. Simonds' novel refuses to be bound by the pedantry of what we think we know about Assia Wevill's life, reimagining timelines, history, and Assia's inner life and creative work to bring her to life as never before. Assia lacks heroes and villains, a limiting theme of past renditions of this story, giving us not just Assia, but Sylvia Plath, David Wevill, Ted Hughes, and even Assia's young daughter Shura in their troubled, beautiful humanity. Assia is non-linear, but never drops the thread of Wevill's life, instead moving back and forth in time to help us better grasp the choices she, and the people in her orbit, made. The book deftly enfolds and interrogates the mysteries and mythologies of Hitler's Germany, stateless people, Sylvia Plath, Palestine on the brink, and swinging London.

"This book is mindblowing. Just when we thought we knew the tragic story of Sylvia Plath or the disturbing details of Ted Hughes' behavior, these pages present Assia Wevill, poet, artist, mother, person. Simonds' brilliance is in reminding us that narratives are just that--a single perspective designed to hold our gaze. Here, Assia moves beyond and around those limited frameworks. In short, this work is more than a reappraisal or a new version of events. It is more like life: striking, messy, quietly revelatory, and beautiful, even in its darkest moments."--Maurice Ruffin

Fiction. Women's Studies.